(4 of 7)
"Mrs. Thing." Perle relishes her position to the full. She has learned not to call society editors to read them her guest list (the girls are glad to call her), but she is not above inquiring coyly after a dinner: "How many ambassadors did I have last night? Six or eight? I never can remember." She often summons her guests from afar, likes to remark casually: "So-and-so is flying in from San Francisco for my dinner tomorrow."
This sort of thing does not sit well with Washington's envious cave dwellers. One refers to her as "Mrs. Thing," claims she has "a hide like an elephant." Another summed up: "She's amiable, of course, but she's commonplace, that's the word—so full of deportment." Adds Virginia-born Lady Astor, a past mistress of the catty crack: "She gives enormous parties that nobody who's anybody really ought to go to."
Perle Mesta is shaped to the mold of a Rubens model who has reached the age of a Helen Hokinson character. Her figure requires stern corseting; she carries a diet book in her purse, consults it before ordering. Except for her parties, she hates to spend money. Once she walked two blocks to Democratic headquarters because her hotel charged 12¢ for a phone call. People are always trying to wheedle money out of her; she does her own ordering for big affairs, and drives a good housewifely bargain. Says Perle, thrusting out her chin: "I'm stingy. That's why I've got my money today."
Her friends, who range from Joe Martin, the Robert Tafts, and the Fred Vinsons to Omar Bradley and Louis Bromfield, find her a likable, kindly woman. Bromfield pronounces her "one of the gayest people I know—she could give you a good time if she had only a five-cent beer." They suspect that she is lonely. With the bounty of a childless woman, she lavishes affection on her blonde niece Betty Tyson, whose Newport coming-out party in 1945 was the gaudiest shindig since before the war. Her restlessness has found outlets in her parties and such causes as the women's equal-rights amendment, for which she has lobbied tirelessly for years. With unconscious wistfulness, she explains: "Only the busy person is happy."
Little Girl. When she is asked about her past, Perle conjures up a picture of an Oklahoma childhood liberally sprinkled with scenes of little Perle in colored hair ribbons matching the sash around her waist. The little girl lived in a big, red brick mansion with stables out back, where each child had its own Shetland pony. Perle likes to say that she organized her first party on her twelfth birthday.
This isn't quite the way some of her Oklahoma City friends recall it. Pearl, as they unfeelingly refer to her, did not come to Oklahoma until 1906, they say, when she was a full-blown, dark-haired woman of 25. Her father, William B. Skirvin, was a farm-implement salesman, a brash, stubby little cockerel of a man, who left Sturgis, Mich, and headed for the thriving Southwest. Like many another boomer, he set up in real estate in Galveston, Tex., then made a killing around Alta Loma, 18 miles north. Oldtimers are still bitter about that. Wrote one:
Away back when Alta Loma was first born
Nothing was here but the Santa Fe track;
A company was formed, which we all know,