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Spooky Atmosphere. Not all of Washington's best hostesses are the wives of ambassadors or Administration officials. At a wood frame house on Woodley Road and a summer cottage in Maine, Mrs. Walter Lippmann, wife of the pundit, graciously entertains a stream of foreign policy experts—Llewellyn Thompson, Averell Harriman, Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy. Another columnist's wife, Mrs. Joseph Alsop, gives small dinners that satisfy even Joe's epicurean palate, has had most top Administration officials (including the President) as guests. Susan Mary Alsop does not talk much at the table, but neither does anyone else once Joe gets going. And while most Congressmen go to far more parties than they give, Mrs. John Sherman Cooper, wife of Kentucky's senior Republican Senator, is known for small, elegant dinners that are perfect down to the demitasse.
"Practicing diplomats," wrote Sir William Hayter, onetime British Ambassador to Moscow and now warden of Oxford's New College, "despise the social arts at their peril." Even so, Washington has its share of those who do little entertaining, or who do it poorly.
Though West German Ambassador Heinrich Knappstein gets $78,500 a year to run his embassy and buy drinks, he is stiff and uneasy at parties, and his wife manages to give the impression that they are an unwelcome interruption in her domestic routine. "They are so nervous, so afraid someone will drop a spoon and upset Herr Foreign Minister that everybody gets nervous," says one official.
With Russia's Anatoly Dobrynin, there are gigantic caviar and cocktail blasts, private dinners for two, and almost nothing in between. "The atmosphere is rather spooky," said a recent lunch guest. "You walk in expecting to see other people, and bang!—you are placed over a bowl of borsch at a table for two in a big room."
Some embassies use the "shotgun technique," mixing up such disparate types as Southern Senators and Justice Department officials. Others save all year for enormous "national day" parties, where nobody can move, much less carry on a worthwhile conversation, and everybody goes away growling. Many of the newer African embassies hold jampacked pours every month or so to repay their social obligations in one easy session.
Colossal Ego. Nicole Alphand would no more play hostess at such a gauche function than brush her teeth with white wine. The second of three children of a middle-class French industrialist, she was raised in Paris, spent two years at an English girls' school, and a year in the conventlike atmosphere of the Collège d'Hulst in Paris. At 17, she met Man-about-Paris Etienne Bunau-Varilla, son of the French engineer-adventurer who in 1903 signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty that led to the building of the Panama Canal. Three years later, she married him.