American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop

I always find it interesting to read about old money WASP ladies like Susan Mary Alsop, whose perfect exterior world covered a life of heartbreak, adultery and alcoholism. The ability to maintain a sterling façade while falling apart inside is an ability which intrigues me since it is alien to my generation. There is much about that exterior to admire, however, as Caroline de Margerie describes in the recent biography American Lady. Susan Mary Jay Patten Alsop knew how to be a gracious hostess and by doing so did more for American diplomacy and the free world than any number of embassy attachés. Her dinners in Paris became legendary for the place to find out what was really going on in the highest circles of power. She welcomed guests regardless of political persuasion; her goal was to create an elegant but relaxed setting for genuine conversation and camaraderie. While what she did seemed effortless, anyone who has ever put on a successful party knows how difficult it can be. Susan Mary's parties were overwhelmingly successful, even after she exchanged Paris for Georgetown. Her guests included presidents and prime ministers, ambassadors and authors, artists and journalists, revolutionaries and aristocrats. The main figures of the twentieth century march across the pages of this engrossing book.

According to The New York Times:

“American Lady,” a new biography of Susan Mary Alsop by Caroline de Margerie, a French judge and former diplomat, reveals the influence and insight of the American hostess, who lived so elegantly in the public eye, and so passionately when no one was watching. 

Unlike her husband, Mrs. Alsop was not a syndicated columnist read by hundreds of thousands. But her gatherings drew people from both sides of the political aisles, creating lasting bonds....

Until she died in 2004, the tradition of giving parties to forge social and political alliances thrived in Washington, perpetuated by savvy, charming hostesses who delighted in making introductions and in smoothing discord between powerful men and women — magnifying their own reputations in the process. Mrs. Alsop was predeceased by Katharine Graham, another partygiver of wit and panache; and before that, by Pamela Harriman (whom she loathed, according to her biographer) and long before that, Perle Mesta. But the saloniste chain has been broken lately; it awaits a new doyenne to reattach the link and keep it growing. 

For those not quite sure who Susan Mary Alsop was, here’s a refresher. Slender, lovely, dark-haired, ladylike and intense, she was born Susan Mary Jay in 1918, descended from John Jay, a founding father and the country’s first chief justice. As a Jay, she had enough family money to live comfortably but not enough to be rich (in her own opinion at least, according to Ms. de Margerie). 

In October 1939, when she was 20, she married a man named Bill Patten, and in 1945, wangled him a job at the American Embassy in Paris, where she gave frolicsome dinners for European, British and American social and diplomatic luminaries that had a serious underlying intent: to strengthen European-American ties.

“She really set herself this purpose quite seriously,” Ms. de Margerie said last week by phone from Paris, on the eve of her American book tour. “She wanted to help Americans understand the French, and vice versa. She thought of herself as a go-between helping two countries she loved, France and America.” 

Ms. de Margerie’s mother in-law, Hélène de Margerie, who attended many of Susan Mary’s Georgetown soirees when her husband, Emmanuel de Margerie, was France’s ambassador to the United States in the ’80s, told her that “going to Susan Mary’s in some ways was like going to an exam: you had to have your French-and-American facts at your fingertips, because you would be examined closely.” (Read entire article.)

Later in life, when not in rehab for alcoholism, Susan Mary would write books, including a history of the Congress of Vienna entitled The Congress Dances. She also helped Jackie Kennedy redecorate the White House. Other than her love of research, her writing and her parties, Susan Mary's life was rather sad. Her great love was the British Ambassador to France, Duff Cooper, whose child she bore, naming the little boy after her husband. Duff did not love her as much as she loved him and had any number of other mistresses. What seems mildly romantic when dressed up in Dior gowns and French country estates would be just plain sordid and disgusting in small town America. For that matter, the chronic diseases suffered by alcoholics, chain smokers, and the sexually promiscuous are unattractive in the extreme, no matter how elegant the trimmings. What makes this book worth reading is the history which the reader is able to watch unfold from a comfortable corner in Susan Mary's living room. With her we watch the world become gradually swallowed by Communism and civil discord as the old traditions of courtesy and discretion fall by the wayside. But in her own way, Susan Mary did her best to create some bright spots in a faded, crumbling culture.

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