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"Very Dull." Once, says Nicole, "I could not bear to leave Paris. But now I am never homesick. We go three times a year to France, but sometimes I say to my husband after a month, 'Let us go home now,' and he says, 'Washington, you mean?'—and I do."
At home she rises at 8:30, breakfasts in bed (orange juice, dry toast, tea), glances at the front pages and gives the society columns a more thorough reading. By 9 she is on the intra-embassy phone. "Dinner for 36 on Wednesday," she tells the chef. "Veal would be nice. We are dancing, so it should not be too heavy. Banana soufflé? Merveilleux!" She exercises for 25 minutes. "I do the sit-up and the push-up and the deep bend. I do also the deep breathing and try to stand on my head." She neither drinks nor smokes, stays between 127 and 135 Ibs. without dieting. By 11 a.m., bathed, manicured and combed out, she is ready to go. But her workday does not really start until dusk. "Call me before 5," she tells a reporter. "After that, I have to go to work."
In a ten-day period last month, Nicole gave a party for 300 to display Pierre Cardin's fall fashions, flew to San Francisco for a week-long "Festival of France," hurried back for dinner at the White House, had 30 ladies over for a "tryon" of Jean Barthet's fall hats, dined at the British embassy, then went to New York City for some shopping.
Last week, she complained, was "very dull." A dozen or so dinners, receptions and luncheons, and nothing to perk things up except a winning day at the races. On a tip from the owner of France's Misti, Nicole bet $5 on the U.S.'s Mongo in the International at Maryland's Laurel race track, collected $24 when he came home 1½ lengths ahead of the favored Kelso. This week starts in a livelier fashion: in Manhattan she will attend a ball at the Hilton organized by the Kennedys to raise funds to combat mental retardation.
'Errveee! For the Alphands, and most other envoys as well, the change in administration in 1961 meant cultivating a whole new range of contacts. "When Eisenhower left," says Nicole, "it was like being sent to a new post. We had to start all over again." But as a friend of Jackie Kennedy's, she had a head start, soon was spending New Year's at Charles Wrightsman's Palm Beach villa with a slew of New Frontier insiders and sailing up the Potomac aboard the Navy yacht Sequoia with Bobby and Ethel and a bouncing group of friends. Says one Administration official: "She knows exactly where the power lies."
So does Hervé, and one Washington hostess claims she can tell precisely where a lady stands with the clan just by the way he greets her. "If he kisses you on both cheeks," said she, "consider yourself in. If he kisses you on one cheek, you haven't been around lately. If he shakes your hand, you are out."