Glamour Fades for Envoys as Heads of State Opt for Personal Diplomacy : Embassy Row: Working lunches in business suits are replacing fancy, full-dress social events in Washington.

The Scottish gardener is tending the rose bushes outside at 8 a.m. as the maid greets British Ambassador Sir Robin Renwick with a breakfast tray of toast and tea in a quiet, sun-splashed study of burnished leather and oak.

Renwick reads the morning newspapers and overnight cables, bids his French wife, Annie, goodby and leaves the embassy mansion in the back seat of a dark green, chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce limousine for another workday that probably will stretch until midnight.

In the Maryland suburbs a few miles north, brown leaves tumble across the front yard of his modest white-brick house as Kingsley C.A. Layne, the first Washington ambassador from the Caribbean republic of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, downs a hurried cup of coffee and a banana in his kitchen.

Then Layne, a bachelor who has neither staff nor limousine, packs his briefcase and grabs a cab to work. He may spend the day stifling yawns during long-winded speeches at the Organization of American States, or he may shuttle to New York for a week’s duty at the United Nations. While he is gone, his friends at the embassy of St. Lucia, which occupies a suite in a downtown office building, will take Layne’s telephone messages.

Renwick and Layne share the same formal title--ambassador extraordinaire and plenipotentiary. And rich or poor, powerful or obscure, they have the same formidable mission in Washington: to win friends and influence people in high places.

The ambassadors of 143 countries, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, are competing aggressively to foster friendly relations with the United States and safeguard their nations’ vital interests.

It’s a job they pursue over lunch with international bankers or dinner with a U.S. senator, in corporate board rooms, the inner sanctum of a Cabinet member or--if they are lucky--in the White House Oval Office.

The schmoozing continues on the tennis courts, at cocktail parties, receptions, candlelight dinners and charity balls.

But the glamour has worn thin on Embassy Row. Gone are the glory days of the early 19th Century, when the imperial Russian minister, Baron Krudener, rode the streets of Georgetown in a white barouche drawn by four black horses. Or when his successor gave a lavish dinner for Secretary of State Martin van Buren followed by a gala ball for 500 guests and a midnight supper.

In an era of “personal diplomacy” between heads of state and the austerity imposed by global hard times, the ambassador’s political clout and social prestige have diminished. Striped pants and receptions have given way to shirt sleeves and working lunches.

“There were many lavish embassy parties when I first came here in 1956. White tie and tails with medals on your chest,” says Costa Rica’s longtime ambassador, Gonzalo Facio. “Now I very seldom wear even a tuxedo. I wear business suits.

“It is much more businesslike today, with working lunches, small dinners and frank talk.”

Today, too, ambassadors are deeply involved in a wide range of issues, such as trade deals and investments, that never bothered their predecessors.

“They’re like the CEO of a small firm or the head of an international office who is trying to drum up business and do some public relations,” says Craig Stoltz, former editor of Dossier magazine, the defunct chronicler of Washington’s embassy scene.

“An ambassador cannot just sit in his embassy and read the newspapers,” says Count Wilhelm Wachtmeister, who was Sweden’s ambassador and dean of the Washington diplomatic corps until he retired in 1989. “The competition for access to the right people in this city is enormous.”

“We are not the highest paid lobbyists in Washington,” says Britain’s Renwick, “but we are an enormous lobbying organization and we try to be among the most effective.”

Enormous, indeed.

Renwick heads an embassy staff of more than 500 people with an annual budget of $32 million that also supports consulates, or embassy branches, in 11 U.S. cities.

Even so, says the State Department, it is not the biggest embassy in Washington in number of diplomats, or career foreign service officers. Until the Soviet Union dissolved, that embassy was the biggest. Now the British are outnumbered by the Chinese, the Japanese and Germans.

Renwick resides in an elegant, red-brick mansion in the Queen Anne style of English country houses. It is the showpiece of a 35-acre estate on Massachusetts Avenue that also includes a six-story office building, tennis court, swimming pool and lush gardens.

Embassy staffers sent from London live in homes owned by the British government in Washington and surrounding suburbs. They get cost-of-living and entertainment allowances, plus reimbursement of two-thirds of the tuition costs at private schools for their children.

The British say they are delighted to live in Washington, but it was not always so.

When John and Abigail Adams moved into the President’s House on Pennsylvania Avenue in November, 1800, only four countries were represented by ministers--Britain, France, the Netherlands and Spain--and all of them detested the city.

For years, Washington was regarded as a diplomatic hardship post. Housing was shoddy, restaurants were inferior, entertainment was scarce and the weather was loathsome.

“A pint of American summer would thaw all Europe in 10 minutes,” Sir Charles Bagot, the first British minister after the War of 1812, wrote a friend in England. “Sir, it is dreadful--it is deleterious--it leads to madness.”

If that weren’t bad enough, the British were outraged by Thomas Jefferson’s disdain for protocol, the universal code of diplomatic conduct that determines such matters as the order of seating at state dinners.

Ever the egalitarian, Jefferson decreed a system of “sit wherever you find a place.” The ensuing scramble for vacant seats at White House dinners offended British minister Anthony Merry, just as Jefferson had intended.

It was not until 1893, when the United States was emerging as a world power, that Congress elevated America’s envoys abroad to the rank of ambassador. Other governments reciprocated, and Britain’s Sir Julian Pauncefote led the parade of full-fledged foreign ambassadors to Washington.

Even today, following the script for ceremonial rituals is “deadly serious business,” says Joseph V. Reed, the New York investment banker and boyhood chum of President Bush who recently stepped down as the State Department’s chief of protocol.

Reed winces when he remembers the welcoming 21-gun salute for Senegalese President Abdou Diouf that never went off, the foreign flags flying upside down, the scrambled cue cards that explained why he effusively greeted an English-speaking African ambassador in flawless French.

Then there was the “talking hat” incident, when Britain’s diminutive Queen Elizabeth II was hidden behind a podium because Bush forgot to pull out a platform for his royal guest. Reed dutifully took the blame for his fellow Yalie’s gaffe.

As protocol chief, Reed was responsible for overseeing state visits and looking after the welfare of all the foreign diplomats and their dependents--22,102 at last count--who live and work in Washington.

“I’m like the mayor of a good-size town with all the usual problems--deaths, robberies, drugs, auto accidents, late payment of bills, kids in trouble,” Reed said in an interview before he accepted a new assignment in the U.S. Mission to the United Nations.

Diplomats and their families are nearly invisible among Washingtonians, except for their special, red-white-and-blue license plates, each bearing a “D” and a two-letter country code assigned by the State Department.

They attend PTA meetings, shop the neighborhood supermarkets, take weekend drives through the Blue Ridge Mountains in nearby Virginia and munch popcorn at Saturday night movies.

Now and then, however, they attract attention because of an important privilege that rankles some of their American neighbors: Under the laws of diplomatic immunity, foreign diplomats and their dependents cannot be arrested, searched, jailed or prosecuted for any crime committed in the United States.

Last year, these hands-off Washington residents were implicated in 15 serious crimes, ranging from statutory rapes and assaults to drug possession, bribery, auto theft and grand larceny.

In such cases, the State Department either requests a waiver of immunity to permit a trial, which the ambassador usually grants quickly, or expels the accused from the United States.

Diplomatic immunity, however, does not allow embassy staffers to duck traffic citations or parking fines, even though police are forbidden to boot or tow their cars.

The embassies’ unpaid parking tickets have become a $7-million headache for the State Department and the District of Columbia, which aren’t having much luck persuading them to settle accounts.

Maybe they could learn something about persuasion from the ambassadors considered among the most effective diplomats in town.

Longtime diplomatic observers and foreign affairs experts on Capitol Hill give high marks to ambassadors Raouf el Reedy of Egypt, Juergen Ruhfus of Germany, Zalman Shoval of Israel, Switzerland’s Edouard Brunner, Czechoslovakia’s Rita Klimova and Michael Sherifis of Cyprus.

Standing above the crowd is the flamboyant Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the ambassador of Saudi Arabia who lives in a $9-million mansion overlooking the Potomac River in McLean, Va. He happens to be the nephew of King Fahd and son of the Saudi defense minister, which gives him uncommon clout in Washington.

“Bandar has extraordinary freedom to wheel and deal on his own,” said a senior adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who requested anonymity. “He has quite a hand in making policy.”

The Saudi king was reported to have given the go-ahead for U.S. military intervention against Iraq during a coded telephone conversation with Bandar, who had called from Secretary of State James A. Baker’s office.

Later, when Syria balked at sitting down with Israelis at the Mideast peace conference in Madrid, Bandar persuaded Fahd to call Syrian President Hafez Assad and urge him to stay the course. Both complied.

“You handle Israel,” Bandar reportedly told Baker. “I’ll take care of Syria.”

Some might think Renwick has an easy task, given what he calls “the extremely close relations” between Britain and the United States. But he disagrees.

“Like most relations, you’ve got to work at it or you start drifting apart,” he says.

Renwick spends a lot of time consulting with high-ranking U.S. officials on trade, banking legislation, the Middle East, nuclear arms policies, Soviet relations and Britain’s $110 billion in U.S. investments.

He took over the British Embassy last August after a highly successful tour of duty in South Africa. Since then, he has visited major U.S. cities from Boston to Los Angeles and escorted Prime Minister John Major on his first official visit to the United States.

A fast learner, he already counts Katharine Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Co., and White House counsel C. Boyden Gray as regular tennis partners.

There is no time for tennis, not to mention sightseeing, for ambassador Kingsley Layne, who represents St. Vincent and the Grenadines simultaneously at the United Nations, the OAS and the United States.

The island republic of 118,000 people in the eastern Caribbean is best known for its bananas and Mustique, the vacation hideaway of such international personalities as Britain’s Princess Margaret and Mick Jagger.

Layne’s primary mission is to protect St. Vincent’s modest economy, which is based on banana exports to Britain, against the threat of devastation by a gigantic new European trading bloc in 1992.

Until Layne can find time to organize his nation’s first embassy in Washington and hire a staff and chauffeur, he works in his suburban home and commutes to downtown appointments by taxi.

“It’s kind of lonely up here,” says the 42-year-old economist.

When he has a free evening to relax, Layne likes to invite a few close friends over for “a taste of Caribbean cuisine,” which he prepares in his kitchen. His favorite menu includes curried goat with seasoned rice and peas.

The British ambassador is no slouch at socializing, either. Last year, Renwick’s predecessor, Sir Antony Acland, had 136 overnight guests and entertained 1,583 people at dinner, 650 over lunch and 90 at breakfast. An additional 5,386 attended embassy receptions and 1,900 came for drinks or tea.