Welcome to the House of fun

Iexpect, a friend from London said confidently, that you will be going to some fashionable Washington party the night Bill Clinton gives his State of the Union address?

Party? State of the Union address? It is true that next Tuesday evening [24 January], after one of the biggest electoral upsets imaginable for an incumbent president, Clinton will make his way through scores of smiling, back-slapping, congratulatory congressmen (and a handful of women) for that peculiarly American bipartisan event, the State of the Union address. It will seem, for all the world, as though Clinton has just won a great political victory.

But it says much about the Washington social scene of 1995 that the thought of going to any kind of party next Tuesday evening never even entered my head. Less than a decade ago, Nancy Reagan might well have got out her Galanos or Adolfo gowns and polished down her Harry Winston or Bulgari jewels for some glittering social occasion, but that style of un-ashamed entertaining started to peter out under George Bush and has all but disappeared in the Clinton era.

It was not so long ago that the Reagan administration's "china policy" referred not to geo-global superpower strategy but to how many pieces of china Nancy Reagan ordered for lavish entertainment at the White House (answer: 4,732, made by a company in New Jersey at a cost of $209,508). Therse were first served at a typically no-expense spared dinner for President Mubarak of Egypt.

In those days the queue of limousines before and after the state dinners would stretch way beyond the confines of Pennysylvania Avenue. It was reckoned that under Reagan the US taxpayer paid an average of $15,000 per guest at each official function, onceall the sundry expenses - accommodation and security, as well as the obvious, like Reagan's favoured Chateau Montelena Chardonnay 1979 - were totted up.

All this seems light years ago. Last week a spokesman for the White House had to check just how many State Dinners have been given in the two years of the Clinton Administration; while the figure would probably have been into double figures under his predecessors, the answer was four, in honour of Japan, South Africa, Russia, and the Ukraine.

The allure of a White House invitation began to fade under the Bush Administration when a New York Times reporter turned down a dinner invitation because her mother had asked her first: an unimaginable snub for a US president.

Hillary Clinton even sacked the White House chef; although both she and Bill Clinton are social chameleons who will privately consume Reaganesque feasts, Southern Fried Ribs fit the Clinton image much better. The only way the two presidential entertaining styles coalesce is in their fascination with Hollywood; Clinton will fight to share his table with Tom Cruise or Barbara Streisand, in the same way that the Reagans sought, say, Frank Sinatra.

But ambitious social hostesses and professional caterers are now hoping the return of the Republicans in droves to Capitol Hill - if not, yet, to the White House - means that lavish entertaining will make a comeback to the nation's capital. And not without good reason: the Republicans have raised more than $16m for party funds since their electoral triumphs last November, and the Democrats less than a quarter of that.

But the auguries are not good. When the new Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, held a "Salute to Newt" night (pronounce it the American way, "Saloot to Noot") earlier this month, the catering for a thousand guests was doneby a barbecue company from Georgia, the state he represents.

More telling still was a phenomenon that occurred the day he was inaugurated as Speaker a fortnight ago: records were broken not for the number of limousines jamming Georgetown streets, but in the sale of take-away pizzas. A spokesman for Domino's, the trendiest of the pizza companies, says that deliveries in the Washington area that day numbered around 12,000, smashing the previous record, which came during a snowstorm. Even the Superbowl brings only about 8,000-10,000 orders.

In other words, most of the great, good and powerful in Washington were at home with their feet up, glued to their televisions for Noot's moment of triumph. Betty Beale, the veteran and now retired chronicler of Washington's social scene, sees the downgrading of entertaining under the Clintons as the continuation of a postwar trend: Washington social life even in the Reagan era, she says, could not compare with that of the Fifties or Sixties, when she would attend between seven and ten diplomatic parties a week. "Young women are more interested in making it in the business world," she says. "In the Sixties, even wealthy parents couldn't persuade their daughters to have a debut. The glamorous social life in Washington, which I assumed was as permanent as death and taxes, is no longer the same."

"Prominent hostesses gained their fame only by the importance of the males they drew to their parties," she recalls. But even the traditional Georgetown hostesses are now a largely extinct breed: perhaps the last of the big-timers, Pamela Harriman, is now US Ambassador to France and has put her Georgetown house up for sale. True, there are still a handful of would-be imitators (like Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington), but their attempts at social grandiosity invariably falter. (She, for example, committ ed the disastrous social gaffe of secretly taping the conversation around the table at her most recent great Washington soiree - much to the subsequent rage of guests such as the Washington Post's editor, Ben Bradlee.)

The professional caterers, meanwhile, are hopeful but not especially optimistic about the Republican revolution: "All of us are delighted that the Republicans are back in business, because they spend more freely, they pay their bills," says Stacy DeLano,a doyenne of the professional catering scene in Washington for 18 years and founder of "Movable Feast".

"But with the pall that laid all over Washington, and all the belt-tightening and all the layoffs and the sort of publicly austere atmosphere that has been created, it may be even tighter than under the Democrats." Gingrich, she says, is not a big party person: "It's like everybody is hanging on to his [Gingrich's] word. You have the feeling that if Newt Gingrich says there'll be no more partying, there'll be no more partying."

She has had no requests for major catering for Tuesday night, she says, wistfully recalling a "Salute to Ronald Reagan" for 1,500 she did during the Bush regime: "We had a cake with cookie elephants (the symbol of the Republican Party) all around the rimand sparklers in the middle - and the lead waiters delivered the cake to the head table on roller blades. Whether you would call it stylish depends on your interpretation, but there was more of a focus on the image, and the sophistication of the food. You feel today that there is a preoccupation with the bottom line.

"The interesting thing will be how all this shakes out - whether it's going to be a return to Republican high times, or whether it's the new austerity." Like other caterers she has increasingly had to look to the corporate world and to law firms for contracts - "and, God forbid, you build up your wedding business". Even two years ago, she says, legions of Washington lobbyists would give lavish receptions, but these days everybody connected to political circles in Washington wants to appear to be spendthrift: "Now it's image, image, image." And that desired image for 1995 dictates that patriotic Americans appear, publicly at least, to lead austere social lives.

The spouses of newly elected members of Congress held a two-day seminar the other day to discover what to expect in Washington, and were even addressed (again in that very American bipartisan manner) by Hillary Clinton. Some were surprised to learn of the Washington social habit of invariably splitting up couples at dinner parties; others that "casual" in Washington does not mean jeans, but (for men) a sports jacket and tie. The cardinal rule for newcomers to Washington, it was explained, is that you should never, never breach the social codes.

Perhaps, indeed, it is only outsiders who feel free to defy current social trends. The biggest catering event Stacy DeLano has organised in recent weeks was the Russian Embassy's Christmas party - partly sponsored by Aeroflot and US Air, and given for 300 of Washington's most powerful. A lavish event? "Yes. A blast. An absolute riot. We had such a good time."

So there we have it. Even if all is quiet in the rest of social Washington on Tuesday night, even if the streets of Georgetown are crammed only with Domino pizza delivery men, we can look forward to the surrealist spectacle of the lights burning well into the night at Washington's hot new social scene: the hitherto stark, austere Russian Embassy, the lonely building one normally just hurries past on Wisconsin Avenue.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps, like most of Washington, the Russians will be at home watching the Bill `n' Noot Show unfold on the TV too. That, after all, is the social reality - so far - of the great Washington political revolution of the Nineties.