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∙LADY ORMSBY GORE. Invitations bearing the lion-and-unicorn crest have long been coveted in official Washington, and Sylvia ("Cissie") Ormsby Gore can have anybody she wants to dinner. In tact, she could probably have everybody, for the massive British embassy is among the world's largest and gets one ot the fattest entertainment-and-housekeeping allowances anywhere ($94,680). Sir David knows the President from the days when Joseph Kennedy was Ambassador to London, sails with him on the Honey Fitz and is friendly with most of the Administration's other key people. Cissie prefers having twelve for dinner "conversationally a good number," but fed 600 at a ball last spring. She is not the field general that Nicole Alphanc is during a party, and a friend says that "she never seems to be quite sure the wine will appear." But her unaffected ways are part of her charm.
∙SRA FERNANDO BERCKEMEYER. American-born Claribel Berckemeyer, the stately, attractive wife of Peru's ambassador, offers French cuisine, fine wines and lively parties at a palatial embassy set on 25 wooded acres in Chevy Chase. She and Fernando, a wealthy aristocrat who went to Notre Dame but speaks with a British accent, often entertain younger members of the New Frontier—the Bobby Kennedys, the Paul Fays—and the guests sometimes form conga lines or twist.
∙SRA. ANTONIO CARRILLO FLORES. When Diego Rivera painted the beautiful wile of Mexico's ambassador, he left her feet bare to emphasize her ' peasant origins." Her parties, attended by the Lyndon Johnsons, Cabinet-level officials and State Department specialists, display a kind of native vitality—featuring mariachi musicians from Mexico City, a table laid with tortillas, black beans and tangy beef, evenings of guitar playing. Carrillo Flores, a full-blooded Tarascan Indian whose father was the 19th child of illiterate parents, made $100,000 a year as a lawyer-and economist, took something like a $75,000 cut to come to Washington.
∙SRA. SERGIO GUTIERREZ-OLIVOS The wife of Chile's newly arrived ambassador scored well with a novel form of entertainment. She and her husband, a former law school dean, worked up a month-long "Image of Chile" program, lured more than 300 diplomats and officials, including the Bobby Kennedys, the Johnsons, the Arthur Schlesingers Jr., to hear performers like Pianist Claudio Arrau and Felicia Montealegre, Leonard Bernstein's actress wife, who recited Chilean poetry.
∙MME BRAJ KUMAR NEHRU. Hunganan-born Shobha Nehru met her husband, a cousin of Jawaharlal's, when they were students in London, and married him in 1935 over the protests of his Brahman family. She has "Indianized" the embassy, throws parties with a strictly Indian flavor. The food, says one guest, "is sometimes unrecognizable but always delicious."