OF Susan Mary Alsop, whose upbringing and marriages put her at the heart of the most important Washington circles, her lifelong friend Marietta Tree said: “She reads the newspapers and journals with the intensity of an editor and, unlike most at a Washington dinner party, she correctly hears and remembers stories, statistics, or slips made to her by the Cabinet minister or ambassador she sits next to. She would have made an excellent Mata Hari.”
No Mata Hari, but certainly vivacious, Susan Mary assiduously chronicled all that she heard, notably in the letters which she sent to Tree from Paris. Those letters were the harbinger of the three histories with which she fulfilled a lifelong ambition to be a writer.
A single child, she was born Susan Mary Jay in Rome in 1918, part of the Jay family which had supplied America’s first Chief Justice, John Jay. She spent her childhood in the diversely exotic locales to which her increasingly invalided father, a diplomat, was posted. After return to America and Barnard College, “the spring of 1939 found me rebelliously refusing the annual pilgrimage to Maine with my mother and settling down at Vogue magazine at $26 a week”. The humble job — as receptionist — brought many a lively evening, and that same spring, with his wife away, Marietta Tree’s first husband asked her to dinner at the St Regis. There, he introduced her to an old college friend, William Patten, of whom she recalled: “I fell immediately and irrevocably in love, and we became engaged a couple of months later but not without some hot pursuit on my part.”
Some advised her against the marriage: Patten’s health was poor — he had emphysema — and, a decade older than her, he was unlikely ever to be rich. This she ignored, although her father had died from the same disease, and they married in October 1939. At first they lived in the dry climates of Mexico and Phoenix, but the dreary country club of the latter exasperated Patten. He knew that to return to Washington would shorten his life, but he was vexed by the war and wanted to urge America’s intervention.
After a time in Boston, he was invited to work for the State Department in Washington, where the couple sometimes had martini-charged dinners with the Roosevelts. In 1945, Patten was sent to Paris as a Foreign Service Reserve officer, nebulously described as a financial and economic attaché.
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En route, they stayed in London, becoming immediately a part of the capital, some of whose social whirl was not slowed by the war. Paris, often described as insular, welcomed such people as the charming Pattens after years of life hidebound by the Occupation. As she bicycled to one cocktail party after another, Susan was early on impressed by the lack of resentment shown to the Germans. Some of the French, she wrote, were by 1945 recognising “future plans of co-operating industrially, and this will produce a head-on clash with de Gaulle and his passion for nationalism and grandeur”.
In what was to be one of Paris’s classic periods, an astonishing array of people passed through her life, whether it was the Duke of Windsor (“the famous charm is still there but I never saw a man so bored”) or “Monsieur X”, whose attentions she resisted (“Frenchmen may be wonderful lovers. I wouldn’t know. Certainly they are good thwarted lovers, bearing no rancour”). Noël Coward “gets a feverish glint in his eye when anyone so much as mentions the Navy”. And “Evelyn Waugh, Lord Carlisle, the Bishop of Fulham, Harold Laski, and Peter Quennell all under one roof and none of them loath to speak up at the table, and all outdone by Louise de Vilmorin, who got fed up at not being allowed to tell a story, so she threw her butter ball up to the ceiling with her butter knife. It held there, stronger than the planet Venus, and so mesmerizing was this feat that all conversation stopped, permitting Louise to launch into one of her truly spellbinding tales.”
At one dinner in 1946, sitting next to Cocteau, she met Churchill; something arranged by Diana Cooper, whose husband, Duff, she observed “can be frightening”. In fact, before long, with Lady Diana’s tacit agreement, she was to become one of those women with whom Duff was to ease the burden of liver and kidney ailments by a dalliance which blossomed into a sort of love, the discreet affair fading without hurt to others. For her it was some solace from her husband’s own ill health.
She knew Dior, and praised the New Look (“such well-made armour inside the dress that one doesn’t need underclothes”); she relished Genet’s earthiness as much as she did Nancy Mitford’s love for old Paris architecture. They later fell out, over America, and, wrote Susan Mary, “she caricatured me in Don’t Tell Alfred as the idiot American sentimentalist that I probably was and am ”.
One of the 20th century’s great parties — far more so than Truman Capote’s masked ball at the Plaza for In Cold Blood — was the 1951 Bestiegui Ball in Venice: in her classic account, one glimpses, amidst the costumes and finery, Duff Cooper, who insisted on being left to finish The Times crossword in peace. The day after the Coronation, for which she had Isaiah Berlin’s War Office balcony ticket to see the procession, she visited the Waughs, of whose household she gave one of the most bemused and astute accounts ever written. She was told by her host to describe to the children the Coronation ceremony itself, which she had not seen and which they had been forbidden to watch on television. She did so with aplomb.
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By the mid-Fifties, with Algiers, the burgeoning Cold War and Patten’s worsening health, the timbre of her days changed from that postwar euphoria. In March 1960, after being on oxygen around the clock, Patten died. In her grief, she was most concerned for her children, and other energies were occupied with a group called “Americans in France for Kennedy”.
Once back in Washington, she hosted many a dinner (tables round or otherwise) at what become known as Camelot: just before one of them, a charged JFK had learnt of the Cuban missiles, which led to his puzzling quizzing of Isaiah Berlin about Russia’s historical reactions when in a tight spot. All this had been further fuelled by her marriage in 1961 to Joseph Alsop, a columnist. She was certainly aware of his homo sexuality; the dynamics were such, however, that the marriage lasted until 1978.
By that time she had established herself as an author, beginnng with her brilliant letters to Marietta Tree, published in 1975, which prompted George Weidenfeld to insist that she write about Vita Sackville-West’s outlandish mother. After that came an account of the first Americans in Paris (1982), and an account of the Congress of Vienna (1984). The latter, popular history at its best, gave an incisive, even racy, pan-European account of the nine months’ life of that swollen city. Looming large, of course was Talleyrand (about whom Duff Cooper had written), and she reminded readers that he suggested to the chef Carême the idea of putting grated cheese on onion soup.
It was Susan Mary Alsop’s skill, learnt from experience, to persuade one that such a thing as this can be more resonant than untold hours of diplomacy.
She is survived by a son and a daughter.
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Susan Mary Alsop, writer and hostess, was born on June 19, 1918. She died on August 18, 2004, aged 86.