The iPhone can feel like a Oujia board. I typed “Perle Mesta” into a text message and the words were immediately rendered in ALL CAPS. Spooked, I tried again with a few other weirdly spelled proper names, but only hers produced this assertive autocorrect.
Somewhere the spirit of Mesta, who died in 1975 at 92 (nine years older than what was widely reported), is chortling. The predominant career hostess when hostessing was still a legitimate career, she really should have a monument in Washington, D.C., where she entertained consequentially for decades, given evocative nicknames like “Perly-Whirly,” “our little pepper-upper,” “the human fireball” — and later, upsettingly, “the old bag of wind.” Nixon, Ford and Carter all argued unsuccessfully to get her on a postage stamp.
But at least there is now “The Woman Who Knew Everyone,” a proper new biography by the journalist Meryl Gordon, who has made a specialty of moneyed matrons and — after digging through a mound of research, including some very amusing menus — here ushers readers in and out efficiently without lingering hangover. (Her subject was a Christian Scientist who didn’t drink.)
Mesta is no longer a recognizable face, and it’s understandable, if misleading, that this book’s cover features her grinning up at Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
They had a promising start when Jackie was still an ingénue photographer angling for invitations to a “Mesta Fiesta,” Gordon reports, but the two women fell out when the hostess, a fierce Lyndon B. Johnson fan, refused to support John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election (that same year she published her own chest-thumping memoir, a best seller now out of print). “I always said Johnson would be president someday,” she blurted tactlessly after Jack’s assassination.
Gracious and inclusive as she was, with gatherings that could stretch to the thousands, the woman who knew everyone antagonized quite a few. “She was the most gauche person you can imagine,” said a senior diplomat in Luxembourg, after Mesta was, for better and worse, dispatched there as an envoy by her close pal Harry S. Truman . “An ignoramus and a pretentious bore,” wrote a departing under secretary after Dwight Eisenhower charged the State Department with removing her from the post, even though they’d baked cakes and played canasta.
Her fluctuating weight was mocked in print. Gwen Cafritz, who also gave great party, dismissed her biggest rival as a barely literate arriviste: “She just came flying out of the outhouse, where she’d found an oil can.”
Mesta was born Pearl Reid Skirvin on Oct. 12, 1882, in Sturgis, Mich. She grew up the tomboyish eldest of three children in Alta Loma, Texas, where their father had made various land grabs, striking oil near Beaumont. (“Only the busy person is happy,” he taught her.)
Perhaps as part of the subterfuge about her age, she often erased this chapter from her life story, preferring to identify with Oklahoma, where the family moved when she was 24, her mother died of flu and the grieving Mr. Skirvin built a grand eponymous hotel. Pearl briefly aspired to be an opera singer, which would deepen her relationship with Truman’s daughter, Margaret. For a while she chaperoned her sister, Marguerite, through a successful acting career.
Pearl met George Mesta, a 20-years-older Italian American steel magnate from Pittsburgh, during a dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. Their marriage lasted almost 10 years — “Oh, how I wanted children, but I just couldn’t,” she said — ending with his death of a heart attack and a pile of money for Pearl, soon to be (as it had sometimes been spelled on their travels to Europe) “Perle.”
With her siblings, she confronted her father’s shady accounting practices, and thanks to a female friend, she became an early advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment and blunt feminist instrument. For Mesta, life would indeed begin at 40, as a popular best seller of that era was titled. Most unusually for the subject of a biography, she’s approaching 70 well before the midpoint of this one, and you wonder how the following pages will ever be filled.
But then of course there is “Call Me Madam,” the 1950 Irving Berlin musical in which Ethel Merman starred as a thinly veiled version of Mesta, with a then-record $1 million in advance ticket sales and a lyric that would forever stick: “the hostess with the mostes’ on the ball.” (Watch the movie version for a quick infusion of daffy American midcentury optimism and the unexpectedly beautiful singing of the usually villainous George Sanders.) She was also said to be the inspiration for Dolly Harrison in Allen Drury’s 1959 novel “Advise and Consent.”
Extroversion was Mesta’s superpower, not introspection. “If you said intellectual integrity, I doubt if she’d know what you meant,” Cafritz sniffed. But her can-do could not be contained. On occasion she seems to exhaust even her biographer into mild syntactic blunder: “Anxious about her status, the sound of her ringing telephone was music to Perle’s ears” and the like.
Without an official appointment but trading on her celebrity, Mesta traveled widely: barging behind the Iron Curtain, mangling the names of Russian leaders and getting tear-gassed during protests in Saigon. She wore blessedly age-inappropriate outfits and led conga lines; wrote about Walter Lippmann learning the twist for McCall’s magazine; danced the Watusi with Cab Calloway. She was ahead of her time, if sometimes bumblingly, on racial integration.
Called “two-party Perle” (later “no-party Perle”) for her flip-flop from one personally preferred candidate to another, Mesta was democratic in the best sense. In 2007, Sally Quinn — no slouch in the D.C. hostess department herself — mourned in Vanity Fair the end of cordial bipartisan gatherings, and it doesn’t seem they’ll be resuming anytime soon. The lady with the canapé has been vanquished by the tech lord and his killer app.
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