Grandest of them all.

THE first quality of the grande dame is that she be grand herself --personally, physically. If she were a statue, she would have to be the one the Metropolitan Museum puts on a plinth in the center of a gallery, not folded into some recess along the wall. Beauty and ugliness are equally irrelevant to her presentation; whichever she is, the grande dame must be striking. Today she runs to thinness, as in the pages of Tom Wolfe. But Mrs. Manson Mingott, Edith Wharton's friend, was strikingly fat. "The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump, active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon." Her flesh helped make her the "high and mighty old lady" that Newland Archer knew her to be. Jewelry can put the copestone on a wall that is otherwise lacking; Mrs. Astor always wore her jewels, wherever she appeared, because she knew, as she herself put it, that people expected to see "Mrs. Astor's jewels." Arthur Miller hectored us, "Attention must be paid!" The grande dame knows attention will be paid.

She must play on a grand stage. Wealth is necessary for outfitting her performance space, but so is taste. Not the taste that makes an apartment cozy, or inviting. Presumably grandes dames raid the fridge, curl up with catalogues, and watch television, like the rest of us, but we don't venture where they do it. What they have themselves, or command in others, is theatricality, the taste of set designers, window dressers, and the best rug merchants in the souk. The colors of their foyers and libraries, whether rich or bright, are bold and extreme. Black and white, in checkerboards or zebra stripes, can add an extra note, shrill but stirring, like the piccolo solo in "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Chairs must be ornamental, not easy--stubby legs? fine; a hard, straight back? no problem--for the point is not to relax. You can do that with a Bud at home. The public rooms of the grande dame are a luxury lounge in the hub airport of society. You pause there, en route, to enjoy yourself, and to be enjoyed by your hostess. The visual and tactile over-stimulation puts you on your mettle.

The social functions of the grande dame are encounters, which it is the privilege and responsibility of her sex to arrange. Encounters are beyond the power of most men, who are loners or pack animals: A man stays up until four in the morning, eating cold pizza slices and writing code, or downloading pornography; or he roams with other men to talk, drink, fight, hunt, make money, or play games. Left to their own devices, men in society would meet only endless replicas of themselves. Women, already bound to one set of aliens, their mates, arrange for other men, from different walks of life, and their attendant women, to meet. At the grande dame's they must listen to (my God!) new things. The pianist will hear about the bull market, governors of square states will learn of the new room at the museum. No one can just unwind with friends because they aren't all friends. They must acknowledge the trays of appetizers, accept or decline second helpings, use and park the finger bowls, and share what they have to say. The rules of interaction will be better managed in Heaven, but the principle will be similar.

In these roomsful of talk the grande dame must be able to more than hold her own. Anyone might come--Henry Clay, Lord Copper, Herman Mankiewicz vomiting drunkenly onto his plate and telling his hostess, "Don't worry, the white wine came up with the fish." Famous monsters; but daily life is full of their equivalents. A complacent artist corrects your pronunciation; a young woman decides to sing a song about her skin, accompanying herself with gently struck brandy snifters; an old habitue, taking sudden offense, walks out. The grande dame must be able to defuse the conversational grenade that lands, pin pulled, on the table top, or throw one of her own. Bad jokes have to be laughed off; bad tempers have to be deflected; if someone pushes, she has to push back, hard. The reactionary philosopher Joseph de Maistre thought that society depended on its executioners; in the society of grandes dames, they themselves must sometimes play that role.

We value them for their independence of mind. Their fortunes may be entangled in inheritance and matrimony; they take on a thousand obligations, charitable, artistic, or political, as well as social; expectation watches every step, from the cut of their coats, to the cut of their remarks (if you are known as a good shot, then, like Wild Bill Hickok, you have to kill on every draw). They have, as recompense, the freedom to say anything, which they often do. They break windows, they sweep the cards to the floor. If they punch below their weight, we feel shocked and chilled, in the presence of power misused, but dames at their grandest know that behaving so is not an extension of themselves, but a lessening.

Snots write them off until the time comes when they would like an invitation. Others may fear or envy them. Everyone else does them honor. Page Six keeps a respectful distance; when they ask for money, wallets fly open; when they pass, it is a city-state occasion. Their second most loyal followers are their honor guards of gay men, drawn to personality and artifice; queens do not serve princesses in Debrett's, but that is the way it works in society. Their most loyal followers are those who are lucky enough to have known them when the materials of grandeur were still fresh from the workshop, a bit soft, not yet available to all.

1926-2007. R.I.P.