From the Seattle Times.

WASHINGTON — Susan Mary Alsop, 86, the grand dame of Washington society whose Georgetown dinner parties epitomized the nexus of political power and social arrival in the 1960s, died Wednesday of complications from pneumonia at her home.

Mrs. Alsop's dining room was considered the absolute center of Georgetown's social scene at a time when President Kennedy's arrival energized the once-sleepy capital.
. . .


As a teenager, she had tea with Edith Wharton and was disappointed that the great writer was "a gossipy old girl," she told a visitor 11 years ago. As the young wife of an embassy official in Paris, she was often seated beside British Prime Minister Winston Churchill when she wasn't drinking champagne with Noel Coward and the Duke of Windsor.