The New Yorker:

Dinner parties in the capital have long been a path to power, but Perle Mesta had her eye on a different prize.

By Thomas Mallon

Washington still cherishes a belief that it was long a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours socializing during which fences were leapt and mended and the gears of the republic were lubricated with alcohol and bonhomie. There is an element of truth to the legend. Until the late nineteen-fifties, all U.S. senators occupied a single Senate Office Building, affectionately called the S.O.B. They saw a lot of one another. But, as they and their ever-growing staffs spread out over Capitol Hill (they’re now in three different buildings), senators became less likely to R.S.V.P. in the affirmative to any Washington social invitation. As Neil MacNeil and Richard A. Baker point out in their 2013 history of the Senate, “Since the 1960s, with the greater availability of high-speed jet aircraft, senators have found it convenient—or politically necessary—to return home at least weekly,” not only to raise money but also to see their families, whom they often no longer bring to live in the capital.

Allen Drury’s “Advise and Consent,” still the most famous of Washington novels, was published in 1959, on the cusp of the changes MacNeil and Baker describe. The book features a hostess named Dolly Harrison, her first name probably an homage to both Dolley Madison and Dolly Gann, a Washington hostess of the twenties and thirties. But some of Drury’s Dolly is a toned-down Perle Mesta, the capital’s most famous mid-twentieth-century party-giver. Readers are told that in Dolly’s “great white house amid the dark green trees”—an image that resembles Mesta’s mansion—“more than one crisis has been solved.” In her 1960 autobiography, “Perle: My Story,” Mesta tells a tale that fits in with the productive fraternizing Drury portrays:

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