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Died. Vincent Sheean, 75, Odyssean foreign correspondent and author; following treatment for lung cancer; in Arola, Italy. Sheean covered many of the century's key events: the rise to power of Mussolini and Hitler, the Chinese revolution of 1927, the Spanish Civil War, the London Blitz and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Charing at the shibboleth of objectivity, he adopted a personal, partisan, generally leftist tone, though his fervor cooled after the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. After the war he turned to biography, writing about Gandhi, Verdi, and his friends Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson. But his best work is his own Personal History (1935), a minor classic on his first years as a swashbuckling, trench-coated correspondent.
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Died. Perle Mesta, 85, capital society's "hostess with the mostes' "; of an apparent heart attack; in Oklahoma City. Famed as "Two-Party Perle" for her bipartisan hospitality, Mesta assembled Senators and Congressmen, celebrities, showpeople and occasionally Presidents for elaborately calibrated soirees over three decades. Perle's gaiety, feigned naughtiness and passion for scandalous secrets charmed a generation of guests. Heiress to fortunes from her father and her husband, a Pittsburgh steel magnate, she mastered machine-tool manufacturing, invested in cattle ranching, campaigned for an equal-rights amendment for women in the 1930s, and buttonholed Southwestern oil barons for contributions to her "hero" Harry Truman during his come-from-behind campaign in 1948. Truman reciprocated in 1949 by creating for her the post of Minister to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where her fetes for the duchess and footloose G.I.s inspired Irving Berlin's 1950 musical Call Me Madam. Her reign as Washington's leading hostess was resumed in 1954 and continued till 1972 with a brief interregnum during the Kennedy years (she backed Nixon in 1960), though she gradually shaded into the role of dowager. Ailing from a hip injury, Mesta left Washington last year without fanfare to be close to her brother, who was holding her hand when she died.