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Rewards & Prerogatives. Only time can tell whether the rewards and prerogatives of her new life will compensate for its restrictions and demands. But there will be many prerogatives. If she wishes to travel, airlines, railroads or steamship lines will produce space for her at the ring of a telephone, and hold up schedules with harried smiles if she is late. The President's DC-6 Independence will be hers to command. Hair stylists and dress designers will scramble to serve her, even though Mamie sticks steadily to her bangs, and, despite owning a few Paris gowns, is a great one for ordering little $17.50 dresses and $16.95 hats from department stores. (Last month, with what seemed like a rather heady air, the New York Dress Institute announced that she was one of the world's twelve best-dressed women.) She will have to share a part of the White House with the public — tourists swarm through its public rooms from 10 to 12 o'clock, five days a week, twelve months of the year —but she will fall heir to comforts & conveniences such as no incoming President's wife has enjoyed since the founding of the Republic.
Dishwashers & Antiques. Reconstruc tion of the 54-room presidential mansion has wiped away the rats, the cockroaches, the sagging floors, the drafts and faulty plumbing which made life miserable for First Ladies of other administrations. The house now boasts a white and stainless-steel electric kitchen in which meals for the largest banquet can be prepared, three automatic dishwashers, a laundry, silk-smooth parquet floors, three elevators, 16 bathrooms, and new paint, new cur- tains, new draperies, as well as its price less old antiques and paintings.
In taking over the great house this month, Mrs. Eisenhower will be assisted by a present complement of 64 (full staff: 72) servants, most of them old retainers, wise in the ways of Washington. If she abandons her lifelong zeal for running a house and never voices a command,, the house will run well. But if she wants to order every meal, redecorate any or all of 35 upstairs rooms (her favorite colors: rose and pale green), shift Lincoln's famed 7-ft. bed, or plant geraniums in the bathtubs, she has every right to do so.*
The Social Whirl. She will inherit a rigid and taxing social schedule into which she will be initiated at once. She must appear, smiling as befits a public darling, at not one but two inaugural balls. Her costume, however, will be far less regal than that of President Tyler's second wife, "the Rose of Long Island," who received on a dais, wearing a crownlike headdress of bugles: Mamie's glittering, wide-skirted inaugural gown, designed by Nettie Rosenstein and purchased from Texas' Neiman-Marcus, is of pale rose poult-de-soie, bespangled by 2,000 rhinestones in varying shades of pink. Mrs. Eisenhower's junior partners as official Washington hostesses are the wives of Cabinet officers. Mrs. John Foster Dulles has been ill—but most of the other ladies were trying on gowns for the inaugural ball and were photographed in their favorites last week (see cuts).