Saturday, April 08, 2006

Ruining it for everyone

The burgeoning Page Six scandal involving Jared Paul Stern is shaking loose lots of interesting stories. While sticking to our hunch that there's going to be Republican angle to it all, there's a blind item, as they say, lurking in this passage from of the Sunday New York Times articles about it:

"I know that people used to be on the take in the old days, but not for money, nothing so vulgar," said Diana McLellan, who wrote "The Ear," a gossip column for The Washington Star and The Washington Post in the 1970's and 1980's. "Caviar and champagne. In Washington I knew some social writer who got a case of champagne and case of caviar from old Iranian ambassador under the Shah."

Who could that be? Of course it could be someone long gone from the trade or indeed from this mortal coil, but then again, search engines can find stuff even back from the 1970s:

Courting Bear Hugs and Invitations
By HUGH SIDEY

Jun. 2, 1975, TIME
Washington is becoming Gerald Ford's town.

.... The Washington Post played the formal white-tie dinner for the Shah of Iran as if Jackie Kennedy had given it. Even Reporter Sally Quinn, late of CBS and a kind of Catherine the Great of the Post newsroom, took enthusiastic notice in a lengthy and detailed article on the Shah's interlude in Ford's Washington ....


The entire article is worth a read in a plus ca change kind of way (except for the Ford bit), but it certainly does point to one Washington social writer giving our man in Tehran the boldface name treatment.

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