Bette Bao Lord, an author born in Shanghai who now lives in New York City, was pleased to be invited to the White House state dinner for Chinese President Jiang Zemin. At the same time, it was hardly a surprising invitation, given that she has written four books about her homeland, two of them bestsellers.
But on the official guest list that the White House made public, and that listed the positions and occupations of invitees, there was no mention of Bette Lord’s achievements. She did not even merit a last name.
That is because it was her husband, Winston Lord, the former U.S. ambassador to China and a former assistant secretary of state, whose status resulted in the Lords’ invitation.
The White House deemed Winston Lord the official guest, and it was his title of assistant secretary that appeared under the couple’s names. Bette Lord was merely the spouse, “Mrs. Winston Lord (Bette Bao),” on the White House list.
“There are a lot of things I would be insulted about before this,” Bette Lord said cheerfully. She nonetheless conceded, “I’d like a last name.”
Among the problems of inequality facing women in America at the close of the 20th Century, the identification on official guest lists of spouses, still mostly wives, is perhaps not the most burning concern. But it is an indication of how the social customs of East Coast power circles still lag behind the changes in society.
In 1997, official guest lists–from those of the United Nations, the White House, Renaissance Weekends and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute benefit, to name a few–have become profoundly inconsistent documents that reflect, and aggravate, the status anxieties of fast-track, two-career couples.
“I’m just this bimbo who hangs around,” said one longtime professional woman, bitterly describing the way the White House listed her, by the maiden name she uses, but without identifying her occupation and without listing her as the wife of the official guest.
In New York, lists range in style from those that would have pleased Emily Post (the New York Social Register still uses “Miss”) to those that would have appalled her (the publicist Peggy Siegal’s “photo tip sheets” for the celebrity press that always list party guests by the woman’s name first). The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute benefit list, in contrast, is a crazy quilt of style that reflects an evening that has evolved over the years from a traditional society ball to a fashion event. So the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Elizabeth Tilberis, was at the top of the list last year as “Liz Tilberis,” the co-chairwoman. But when her name appeared later on the guest list, she was “Mrs. Andrew Tilberis.”
Karen Elliott House, another White House state dinner guest, did no better. As president of the international division of Dow Jones, House oversees 600 employees and $100 million in annual revenues. But the White House decided that the official invitee was her husband, Peter A. Kann, who was listed as the chairman of the board, chief executive officer and publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Karen Elliott House was merely “and Ms. Karen Elliott House.” She was not identified as Kann’s wife, even though James Earl Carter III was identified as the son of another guest, former President Jimmy Carter.
Why? Under White House protocol, “parentage is permanent but marriage is not,” or at least not always, said Marsha Berry, the spokeswoman for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“What you’ve got here is not protocol,” said Judith Martin, who writes the syndicated “Miss Manners” column. “What you’ve got here is a mess.”
Martin said: “You do not invite only one person of a married couple, you invite the couple. There is no such thing as a second-class guest.”
It is important to point out that male spouses and dates are typically treated the same as their female counterparts.
David Rockefeller, the former chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, came to the White House state dinner as the guest of Katharine Graham of the Washington Post, and was only identified on the White House list by name. For him, that is probably enough.
But is it for Patrick Stewart, the guest of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright? And is he the Patrick Stewart who played Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise and is also a Shakespearean actor? The White House list didn’t say, but yes, he is.
But the guest list spouse problem continues to fall most heavily on women, whose reactions to the slights range from indifference to the feminist equivalent of road rage. Many women simply get irked when they see the lists, behave themselves at the parties, then complain to their husbands on the ride home. Husbands often say that it is silly to get upset about a list that means nothing.
But to wives, a listing is often a wakeup call that the world has not changed as much as they think. Two years ago, Jacqueline Leo was the editorial director of ABC’s “Good Morning America” and was invited with her husband, John Leo, the U.S. News & World Report columnist, to a conference in Aspen, Colo., organized by the financier Teddy Forstmann.
When the Leos arrived in Aspen, Jacqueline Leo saw that it was John Leo who was the official guest and that it was his position included on the list that circulated among participants. She was named as his wife. “In a way, it was kind of quaint,” Jacqueline Leo said.
Some newspapers that published the more than 200 names on the White House list, one of the most scrutinized in recent years, made things worse. The New York Times ran the list that The Associated Press compiled from the White House, which was put together on deadline by a harried AP editor.
In an effort to provide more information about spouses than the White House did, the editor identified some people as either wives or husbands, if she knew or had time to look them up.
So House was Kann’s wife on the AP list, but Laura R. Handman, a lawyer who specializes in 1st Amendment cases and who is married to former White House deputy chief of staff Harold M. Ickes, was not identified as anyone’s spouse.
A similar situation occurred at USA Today, where at least three librarians and a Washington editor frantically filled out the gaps in the White House list between the time they received it, at midafternoon Oct. 29, and their deadline of 8 p.m. “Initially I said, `Look up every wife,’ ” said Gwen Flanders, the editor. “But when it got down to the practicality of it, we didn’t have time.”
The White House acknowledges that its rules could be changed. “There is a real effort to be consistent in these matters,” Ms. Berry said, “but also a recognition as we’re coming to the end of this century that some of this process needs to be reviewed.”
Many official lists have modernized, like those of Millie Harmon Meyers, the chief of protocol for the U.S. mission to the United Nations. “My predecessor followed the more traditional way of doing things,” Meyers said. “But so many women here are single, or the key person who you might invite to an event. So the traditional things didn’t work.”
Unavoidable, even to Meyers, is that in the world of official entertaining, where what one does for a living is the reason for most invitations, spouses are only rarely completely equal in power.
In the view of “Miss Manners,” such a world “exposes the crudity of what we know is true, but isn’t very nice, which is that in every couple one is probably more desirable than the other.”
Letitia Baldrige, the White House social secretary to Jacqueline Kennedy, thinks a spouse’s position should be on White House guest lists, within reason. She suggests as an example including the information that a woman is president of a club, but not that she is just a member.
Martin agrees. “Do you really want to say, `Mary Jones, cocktail waitress? Whom Secretary Jones met last week, and for whom he is now renting an apartment?’ I don’t think so.”
