Maria Callas and Elsa Maxwell

A very different saloniste about the same time was Susan Mary Jay. She was descended from John Jay, a Founding Father and America’s first Chief Justice. She married American diplomat Bill Patten, moved to Paris, and became the hostess with the mostest in the City of Light. She became a good friend of Nancy Mitford, although la Mitford skewered her as overly earnest in one of her novels. Unlike Maxwell, Susan Mary was beautiful, elegant, and very sexy in that cold American come-hither way.

Here’s George Jean Nathan again:

[F]ew women…as compared with men, marry for love. It is perhaps not unfair to say that where four men out of five marry for love, not more than two women out of five marry for the same reason.

Hear, hear!

Susan Mary did not love Bill passionately—Patten was a saint, and who could love a saint?—but she did fall for a non-saint, Duff Cooper, and later for another Brit ambassador, Gladwyn Jebb. She was a fashion icon, chic and terribly elegant and very, very interested in politics. After Patten’s death in 1960, she moved to Washington and married Joe Alsop, the upper-class American right-wing columnist whose power was enormous, just as his homosexuality was well-known but deeply embedded in the closet. It was a marriage made inside the Beltway. He had power and all the social connections, while she had the refinement, background, and knowledge to complement his strengths. The night JFK became president he went to the Alsops and stayed up all night talking politics.

Although one should never kiss and tell, I met Joe Alsop when I was just starting my brilliant career as a journalist, in Athens of all places, because the colonels had just sprung a coup and Alsop was there to find out all about it. I believe he met with the King, who was at the time trying his best to get rid of the military, and then Alsop took me out to lunch with Arnaud de Borchgrave. Not to brag, but he told me that I looked like a Turkish delight to him—I was wearing bathing trunks—and I answered I was from the Ionian, where the Turk never set foot. I only wish Susan Mary had said that to me instead of Joe the Homo (who was a wonderful man, by the way).

Hacks who don’t know any better usually speak about Pamela Harriman as a powerful hostess in DC. She was nothing of the sort, being basically ignorant and much too greedy to learn about politics. The only one who ever took her seriously was Bill Clinton, but he grew up as trailer trash, so he’s excused.