By Alec Russell in Washington
(Filed: 15/10/2005)
It has survived the fast-food "vulgarianism" of Bill Clinton and the Tex-Mex "cowboy" tastes of George W Bush. But now the grand Washington dinner party is facing the zero-tolerance regime of the DC police, who insist a single glass of wine is too much if you want to drive home.
For decades the city's social powerbrokers have maintained the dining traditions of a bygone era: dress "informal", meaning frocks and suits; the honoured guest receiving and delivering an elegant homily and, crucially, cocktails, several wines and liqueurs flowing.
Ronald Reagan, who presided over a boom in Washington entertaining after the drabber years of the Carters, dubbed the city's legendary hostesses, "the Georgetown Ladies' Social Club". As they and their successors have long made clear, it takes more than the arrival of a new First Family at the White House to knock them off their perch.
Bill Clinton may have been known on the 1992 campaign trail for his midnight pizzas and love of deep fried chicken but, like his predecessors, he made the social pilgrimage to the table of Katharine Graham, the late owner of the Washington Post.
Speculation that his successor would oversee a culture change also proved wide of the mark. As his critics love to chortle, the tee-totalling Mr Bush likes being tucked up by 10pm. He has hosted only a handful of state dinners and he provoked Batemanesque outrage in Georgetown when one of his first trips out of the White House was to a garish Tex Mex joint. But the dinner parties have continued apace.
This week, however, the dinner party set awoke to a dire new challenge. Emblazoned on the front page of the Post, was the chilling cautionary tale of Debra Bolton.
It was about half past midnight one morning last May. The 45-year-old lawyer was on her way home from dinner at Café Milano, a trendy eatery in Georgetown when she was pulled over by the police for driving without lights.
She apologised, admitted to having drunk one glass of wine and ended up being handcuffed, imprisoned and facing a four-month legal battle.
For Sally Quinn, wife of the Post's former editor, Ben Bradlee, and the self-designated successor to Katharine Graham, this was too much.
"All I can say is thank God none of the legendary Georgetown hostesses and grandes dames is left in Washington to see this day," she wrote in the paper. "The city may just as well roll up the red carpet and shut its doors after what we have just learned."
Her reminiscences of the 1970s when five-course dinners starting with martinis and ending with Dom Perignon and crêpes Suzette sounded, as she admitted, a little wistful.
The concept of a political salon is a bit passé these days; five courses have become three and it is widely acknowledged you need a heavy European - preferably British - presence to keep an occasion going after 11pm.
David Heymann, author of The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club, says the new era is a pale imitation of the old. He believes possibly only Teresa Heinz Kerry, the fabulously wealthy wife of Mr Bush's defeated Democratic challenger, can now afford a Katharine Graham-style entertaining schedule.
But to anyone who has endured hours of politicking over dinner from the city's regiments of blazered apparatchiks, Miss Quinn's conclusion rings all too true: "Who's going to drive to some horrible official party knowing they can't have a drink? How do you think people get through these parties anyway? It's not by drinking Diet Coke."
But he wouldn't be driving drunk anymore if I had control of the penalities.