Sally Quinn has written the definitive book on throwing fashionable parties in Washington, but has cut down on going to parties herself. She and her husband Ben Bradlee, former editor of the Washington Post, dine in most nights with their 15year-old son, Quinn, who is going to boarding school soon.
"We don't go out as much as you think. This week we have nothing on the books at all," Sally Quinn said, sitting in the library of their 200-year-old house in Georgetown once occupied by a son of Abraham Lincoln. "This has been an odd winter as there has been very little going on."
Her book, called The Party - A Guide To Adventurous Enter- taining received rave reviews, but has probably made other Washington socialites wary of inviting Quinn and Bradlee unless everything is perfect.
The New York Times gushed: "If Jane Austen had written about parties in her time, this is the book she would have written."
I stumbled across the one negative review on the Internet magazine, Salon which said that The Party "reads like a vacuumpacked slice of memoir; it's a miniature epic of name-dropping and score-settling".
Arianna Huffington and several embassies get black marks for faux pas at their dinner parties. Huffington bored the pants off leading journalists by making them discuss New Age spirituality. "I could have written a lot worse," Quinn says a little defensively.
A Spanish ambassador drove his guests mad by making them sit through a second-rate flamenco show after a long, boring dinner when everyone wanted to escape. The French embassy once froze guests in an unheated tent.
There was also the episode of the over-wrought wife of a Canadian ambassador who slapped the face of her social secretary in full view of photographers when she was told an important guest had called off.
The perfect party, by the way, is the one that features "the President and First Lady coming for cocktails and then leaving before dinner so that everyone can relax and talk about it for the rest of the evening."
Quinn's humorously illustrated book has tips for every kind of entertaining - and distinct rules for guests on how to behave. The cardinal sin is to be boring, either as a party-giver or a guest. When all else fails as a conversation topic, there is always sex to fall back upon. It never fails, she says.
One night the talk turned to how it was impossible not to know if your spouse was having an affair. One of the guests was Nora Ephron who had recently learned that her journalist husband, Carl Bernstein, was having an affair with Margaret Jay, wife of the then British ambassador in Washington.
Nora asked for a bottle of red wine although the guests were drinking white and then proceeded to pour it slowly over Carl's head. Later in her best-selling novel and movie, Heartburn, Ephron changed this to a pie in the face. "But all in all, it was a memorable evening and the food, though good, was the least of it," comments Quinn.
Her parents, Gen "Buffalo Bill" Quinn and Bette Quinn were great party-givers during his term in the US army and even in retirement into their 80s at their home on Maryland's Eastern Shore. The day of our interview, Sally Quinn was waiting for news of her father's operation, but insisted on letting the interview go ahead.
Her father has visited Ireland frequently, seeking Irish relatives. The first Quinn settled in Maryland back in the early 1700s after his ship was wrecked when approaching Baltimore. The Quinns were originally Catholic but over the years became Episcopalian.
Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee are also now frequent visitors to Ireland, thanks in part to Tony O'Reilly's appointment of Bradlee to the board of his worldwide media company. They stay in O'Reilly's house, Castlemartin, but have also travelled independently around the country.
What does she think of the present White House entertaining? "The Clintons are interested in getting as many in and out of the White House as they can, so there has been a lot of entertaining which has been very official," Quinn says.
"It seems to have ended up more photo-op than parties, where the Clintons stand downstairs and get pictures taken with everyone and often don't make it upstairs to the party itself."
The St Patrick's night reception was an exception, Quinn said, when I pointed out that the president and Mrs Clinton had come up to join the guests after 600 of them had queued to have their pictures taken on the receiving line.
"How can you have a bad party if it's for Irish people. I had friends who were there and had good fun."
Although Quinn made her name as a writer for the Style section of the Post, reporting on Washington parties, she keeps reporters away from her own parties unless they are there as guests. "People don't feel comfortable when reporters are taking down everything they say."
When she covered the Washington scene it was at big receptions where everyone knew members of the media were present. But these events don't get covered any more, she says.
Her future husband advised against her being hired as an editorial page secretary when she applied for a job with the Post in 1969. As Bradlee says in his own recent autobiography, "I advised him (Phil Geylin) against hiring her, and not just because she couldn't take shorthand. I suggested to Phil that anyone that attractive could make work difficult."
Several months later she was hired when Bradlee decided to give her a chance at covering the social scene. She became one of the sharpest profile writers in Washington.
She left in 1973 for a short-lived career as a TV anchorwoman with CBS which did not work out. She had also fallen in love with Bradlee, whose own marriage was breaking up.
She came back to the Post and they became a couple, living in the Watergate complex. The rival Washington Star gossip column used to call her "Bradlee's live-in girlfriend". Five years later they were married.
Their only son, Quinn, nearly died soon after birth from a hole in the heart. The night after his successful operation, they went home and called a party for 25 people with Chinese take-aways. That's the secret of being a successful host, she says: Be adaptable.
The Party: A Guide To Adventurous Entertaining by Sally Quinn is published by Simon & Schuster, price $24 in the US