20 Society Hostesses Who Wielded Power Like Today’s Influencers

Evalyn Walsh McLean, born to an Irish immigrant father who struck it rich in Colorado, was one of the most famous and lavish hosts in Washington in the early 20th century. McLean purchased the Hope Diamond from jeweler Pierre Cartier, wearing it in public herself and occasionally having a pet wear it as a novelty act around her estate. At her mansion, Friendship, dinner parties drew Democrats and Republicans alike, with cabinet secretaries, justices, and ambassadors gathered to share stories they’d never repeat on the record. She died of pneumonia at age 60 in 1947.

Caroline Astor, better known simply as “The Mrs. Astor,” held court out of her mansion on Fifth Avenue in the Gilded Age, when new fortunes were being made in America. Along with her social advisor, Ward McAllister, she created a social register known as “The 400” to shield the old colonial and Dutch families from the newly rich, although the roster McAllister actually published contained 273 names. The true arbiter of who was in was the annual January ball. Astor died in 1908, at 78.

Peggy Guggenheim, whose father went down with the Titanic, was a major American collector of modern art. She opened a gallery and salon in New York called Art of This Century in October 1942, a place where European refugees from World War II and surrealist artists mingled with American artists. Peggy gave Jackson Pollock, then unknown, a small income to paint. She also gave him his first one-man show in 1943. Later, Peggy took her collection to Venice, where she died in 1979, at age 81.

Lady Emerald Cunard, an American shipping heiress, was among the leading hostesses of interwar London. She underwrote Sir Thomas Beecham’s opera seasons at Covent Garden, ensuring that British grand opera survived the Depression years. In the mid-1930s, her home was where King Edward VIII and the American divorcee Wallis Simpson often met, a relationship that led to the king’s abdication in December 1936. She died in London, aged 75, in 1948.

In the Gilded Age, Alva Vanderbilt, married into a nouveau riche industrial clan that was spurned by New York’s elite, erected a grand chateau on Fifth Avenue and gave a costume party in 1883 for 1,200 guests. She didn’t invite Caroline Astor’s daughter until Mrs. Astor made a formal call on Vanderbilt, compelling America’s most powerful social arbiter to recognize Vanderbilt’s family. Years later, after her divorce and marriage to her second husband, Oliver Belmont, she used her wealth to champion women’s suffrage. She died in Paris in 1933, at age 80.

Virginia-born Nancy Astor was the first female member of Parliament to occupy a seat in Britain’s House of Commons in 1919 (the Irish republican Constance Markievicz had been elected a year before, but never assumed the position). During the 1930s, she entertained weekend get-togethers for politicians and diplomats at her Buckinghamshire home, Cliveden. Although a journalist later accused the circle of being a pro-Nazi cabal known as the “Cliveden Set,” historians today are more skeptical of the charge, though her guests did tend toward appeasement. Astor died in 1964, aged 84.

The Marquise de Pompadour, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, was the official chief mistress of France’s King Louis XV, hosting elite gatherings from her private quarters at the Palace of Versailles. She backed François Boucher as a painter, supported Voltaire, the writer, and secured the King’s support of the Sèvres porcelain factory in 1756, making French taste fashionable throughout the continent. Her influence also extended to the Rococo style and fashions, including hairdos, at other European courts. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 42 in 1764.

Oklahoma oil-and-steel heiress Perle Mesta, dubbed the “Hostess with the Mostes’” after throwing frequent, influential dinner parties in Washington, thought she could help break political logjams by bringing rival senators, justices, and diplomats together at the dinner table. A friend and fundraiser of President Truman’s, she was named U.S. Minister to Luxembourg in 1949. Later, Irving Berlin wrote a musical, “Call Me Madam,” about her. Mesta died in Oklahoma in 1975, at 85.

Jennie Jerome was a young American heiress, one of the “Dollar Princesses.” Jennie married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874, becoming Lady Randolph Churchill and joining the Marlborough family. Jennie held a salon in London that attracted Conservative and Liberal politicians of the late Victorian period. In 1895, Lord Randolph died, and Lady Randolph lobbied prime ministers, generals, and editors on behalf of her son, Winston Churchill. Lady Randolph died in London, England, in 1921 at age 67 following complications resulting from a leg amputation.

Daisy Fellowes, heir to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, was one of the premier hostesses of Paris and the French Riviera during the interwar period. As Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar, she wrote fashion columns that were widely read around the world and influenced the trends of the era. She was also the principal muse of the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, wearing several of her most daring designs in public. She commissioned Cartier to create her “Tutti Frutti” necklace, a masterpiece of carved gems, in 1936. She died in Paris in 1962, at 71.

Widely regarded as America’s first professional female interior decorator, Elsie de Wolfe was a New York hostess after a career as an actress. She eschewed heavy curtains and dark Victorian parlors in favor of light chintzes, pale walls, and airy rooms meant for conversation. In 1905, she decorated the Colony Club, the first exclusive women’s club in New York, and founded her business. A book she wrote about taste also proved popular, and she eventually began throwing costume parties at her villa outside Versailles. De Wolfe died there in 1950, at 85.

Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, a rich widow, hosted the leading intellectual salon of the French Enlightenment in her Parisian residence. She hosted artists and philosophers on separate days of the week and kept a tight grip on the conversation. She also gave heavy financial backing to writers, most notably funding Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie when state censorship threatened to bury it. Voltaire wrote to her often and was one of her prized philosophers. Although in exile, he never visited her salon.

Juliette Récamier presided over one of Paris’ most influential salons, where she redefined post-Revolutionary French taste by abandoning the corsets and voluminous skirts of the Ancien Régime in favor of the Neoclassical gowns and short bobs. The artist Jacques-Louis David painted her reclining on a backless chaise in 1800, but when he fell out with her, he abandoned the painting. The portrait still became the impetus for the “Récamier” sofa, which was reproduced throughout Europe. She died of cholera in Paris in 1849, aged 71.

Lady Sibyl Colefax, who entertained many notable figures during her interwar London soirees, including Winston Churchill and writer Virginia Woolf, went bankrupt after the 1929 stock market crash. But she managed to turn her fame into a business, starting a decorating firm and later teaming up with designer John Fowler to create Colefax & Fowler. The English Country House style they popularized with their abundant use of chintz, among other things, was one of the most influential interior-design trends worldwide over the next several decades. Colefax died in London in 1950, at 76.

Mabel Dodge Luhan, an American heiress, held one salon on each side of the United States. In Greenwich Village during the mid-1910s, “Wednesday Evenings” brought together radicals like Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and John Reed, who debated issues like socialism and modern art. In 1917, she moved to Taos, New Mexico, where she hosted the likes of painter Georgia O’Keeffe, author D.H. Lawrence, and photographer Ansel Adams, drawing attention to the Southwest and Native American culture. Luhan died in Taos in 1962 at age 82.

Lady Ottoline Morrell was a British hostess whose houses at Bedford Square and later Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire became meeting places for members of the Bloomsbury Group of writers. She provided food, lodging, and a stipend to writers such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, and D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence’s unflattering caricature of her in his 1920 novel Women in Love estranged them for almost ten years, but they later reconciled, and she visited him shortly before his death. She died in London in 1938, at 65.

Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington was a novelist born in Ireland who was shunned by upper-class society due to an earlier marriage controversy. From the late 1830s onwards, she hosted a successful literary salon at her London home, Gore House, which counted the young Charles Dickens and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli among its guests. In order to finance her lavish entertainments, she edited literary annuals like The Keepsake, soliciting contributions from the literary stars who frequented her salon. She escaped to Paris to avoid creditors in 1849 and died there later that year, aged 59.

For years, Grace Vanderbilt held court at her Fifth Avenue mansion with 58 rooms and her Newport villa, Rosecliff. She was the queen of New York society. The occasion that put her ahead of the other Vanderbilts in society was her entertaining Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of the Kaiser of Germany, in 1902. She poured out money year after year on entertaining, maintaining the formal protocols of the Gilded Age when most families had abandoned them. Grace Vanderbilt died in New York at age 82 in 1953.

Millicent Rogers, an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune and a muse to the couturier Charles James, moved to Taos, New Mexico, in 1947 following personal tragedy. She wore her French designer gowns with Southwestern turquoise jewelry and hand-woven fabrics. Her images were reprinted in magazine shoots across America. Rogers also made appeals to officials in Washington to protect Native American artisans. Rogers died of illness in New Mexico in 1953, at age 50.

Napoleon Bonaparte exiled the Swiss-French writer and political theorist Germaine de Staël, whose father had been France’s finance minister, from Paris because of her anti-despotic writings. In Switzerland, she made her estate at Coppet a gathering place for liberal intellectuals throughout Europe. The “Coppet Circle” promoted constitutional liberalism and early romanticism. To Napoleon, they were such a threat that, in 1810, he banned her book De l’Allemagne, destroyed all available copies, and placed her under police surveillance. De Staël died in Paris in 1817, aged 51.

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