Susan Mary Alsop, who proclaimed that she saw “no future in being an ordinary person” and became a celebrated political hostess and later an author, died on Wednesday at her home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. She was 86.
At 1:46 a.m. on Jan. 21, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, after attending his five inaugural balls, showed up, supposedly unannounced, at the doorstep of the Georgetown house then belonging to Mrs. Alsop and her husband, Joseph, the political columnist. Kennedy stayed 90 minutes and enjoyed some soup and champagne.
For the next few years, Mrs. Alsop said, she felt she had to have her hair done all the time, “just in case I would be asked to the White House.”
The glitter of her social whirl sometimes masked the serious business it facilitated. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Kennedy dined at her house with two Soviet experts, diplomat Charles Bohlen and philosopher Isaiah Berlin, whose insights helped to inform his judgments in his showdown with Moscow.
Mrs. Alsop was a direct descendant of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and Joseph Alsop called the couple’s crowd “the ever-diminishing group of survivors of the WASP ascendancy.”
Her life sparkled with acquaintances such as Winston Churchill and Greta Garbo, and the great Paris designers, including Christian Dior, gave her their latest couture when she was a Parisian socialite. As a teenager, she was thrilled to be invited to tea with Edith Wharton, only to find her boring.
At 56, Mrs. Alsop began a writing career, specializing in popular history. One of her four books, “The Congress Dances: Vienna 1814-1815,” captured enough spice from that epochal meeting of Europe’s leaders that several reviewers said it gave new meaning to affairs of state.
“It is as if Alsop had attended the festivities herself, and then, returning at dawn, recounted each and every detail so as not to lose a crumb,” Prince Michael of Greece wrote in a review in The Washington Post.
Susan Mary Jay, the daughter of a diplomat, was born in Rome in 1918 and grew up in South America, Europe, Washington and New York. She attended Barnard College.
In 1939, she began working at Vogue as a receptionist, writer and model. She married William Patten, who, like her father, was a diplomat. In 1941, they moved to Washington. Franklin Roosevelt Jr., a friend of her husband, invited them to supper with his parents at the White House.
The Pattens then lived in Paris, socializing with people such as the Rothschilds, Cecil Beaton and Ho Chi Minh. Patten died in 1960, and the next year, she married Alsop, who had been Patten’s roommate at Harvard University. She and Alsop were divorced in 1978, but remained friends and played host at each other’s parties. He died in 1989.
