Diplomatic Impunity

Vanities

Washington's twinkling hostess

ONE night you can run into Secretary of State George Shultz and his predecessor, Alexander Haig. Another night it will be Donald Sutherland, Margot Kidder, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Mordecai Richler. The Canadian Embassy in Washington is the only social hot spot on Embassy Row, where most people still use guest lists compiled three thousand years ago, during the Johnson administration.

Sondra Gotlieb, a novelist and newspaper columnist, and her husband, Allan, the Canadian ambassador and formerly Pierre Trudeau's undersecretary of state for external affairs, have created what passes for one of the capital's very few salons. In a muted-blue reception room furnished with French side chairs and the requisite Oriental rug, the Gotliebs collect the powerful, the correct, and— strangely enough, given the singular drabness of the foreignservice party circuit—the interesting. Those who usually wouldn't be caught dead at an embassy affair will always go to the Gotliebs', certain of meeting someone they know or need to know.

"You have to have people over who other people want to meet, because interesting people won't come to your house unless there are other interesting people there,'' says Sondra. "The Canadian taxpayers are not paying us to entertain charming but ineffectual people. "

Sondra has learned some basic facts about Washington entertaining that seem to have eluded most ambassadors and their wives: Good parties have nothing to do with lavish food and nice table decorations. Good parties are work. If you want to help sell Canadian subway cars to the United States, or if you want the White House to care about acid rain, the best way to arouse interest is to throw a dinner party for the right people.

Never mind that you don't know them—in Washington, nobody cares.

During one typical week, the Gotliebs had sixty-five people to dinner on Sunday, fifteen to lunch on Monday, twenty to dinner on Tuesday, and twenty again to dinner on Wednesday.

"You become a temporary princess,'' says Sondra. "You live the life. If you want to have a party and you have the evening free, it's 'Well, let's have a party.' "

Of course, a princess's life is not always such unrelenting fun. Even the socially successful Mrs. Gotlieb is often socially ill at ease. When she first arrived in Washington, in 1981, she was in a state of panic, unaccustomed to the cook, the chauffeur, and the upstairs maid, and unprepared for the entertaining she was expected to do. Still nervous at even her own parties, she will sometimes blurt out the odd comment that leaves the table in silence. And at someone else's house she reportedly once demanded a better wine from her hostess. "There is nothing worse," she says, "than walking into a room of two hundred people where you don't know anybody and saying, 'Hi, I'm Sondra Gotlieb, the ambassador's wife,' and they say, 'Iused to go trout fishing in Canada.' I used to get a lot of questions like 'What's Margaret doing?' " How does she cope? "Sometimes you can sneak upstairs in the middle of a party and nobody will know you've gone."

All this, however, makes good material for the humor column she contributes twice a month to the Washington Post about the mysterious ways of the diplomatic community. Written in the form of letters home to a friend named Beverly, her articles describe a world where women are referred to only as "wife of," where important administration people are called Powerful Jobs, and where the number-one hostess is Popsie Tribble. The column, she says, is a convenient topic of conversation. "People will come up to me and say they like it, and they'll ask how I got started with it. So that takes up two minutes. ' '

The pieces are widely read and much talked about, though some critics complain that Sondra has never used them to make a more sophisticated analysis of the city and its inhabitants, whose problems she understands quite well. "You need a friend," she says. "You need somebody, desperately. The thing about Washington is that you meet people and then they disappear. Where do they go? What if you want to go to a movie with someone? There is a disconnected feeling. As a wife of an ambassador, you are willynilly part of his job. If he's not there, the action stops. And then here you are, in this big house, and what the hell are you going to do? Americans always seem so warm and friendly, and they send beautiful thank-you notes. But this is not a city of intimacy. You think, Gee, what if something happened? Who do you call?"

Her advice to other ambassadors' wives? "Don't be taken in by people who want to come to your embassy. Basically you are here to do a job. We're not here for our own good time. "

Elisabeth Bumiller