دانلود رمان انگلیسی “زنی که همه را می شناخت”

Nestled high in the Rocky Mountains, with picture-postcard views and healing hot springs, the Hotel Colorado attracted a rich and famous clientele from the day it opened in 1893. More than a half-century later, when Broadway star Ethel Merman needed a break in July 1949 from belting “There’s No Business Like Show Business” in the long-running show Annie Get Your Gun, she chose this isolated spot. Accompanied by newspaper executive husband Robert Levitt and their two young children, she convinced playwright Howard Lindsay and his actress wife Dorothy Stickney to join them. Merman had starred in two musicals created by Lindsay and his writing partner Russel Crouse (Anything Goes in 1934 and Red, Hot, and Blue two years later). These members of Broadway royalty hoped to join forces again, but the Rocky Mountain sojourn wasn’t meant to be a working vacation, just a chance to relax nearly two thousand miles from Manhattan’s autograph seekers. However, inspiration doesn’t punch a time clock. Sitting by the pool that July, catching up on his reading, Lindsay picked up a several-months-old copy of Time magazine featuring a cover story about Perle Mesta, the Washington party giver who counted President Harry Truman among her closest friends. Anointing Perle Mesta “the capital’s No. 1 hostess,” the March 14 Time solemnly stated, “Washington society persists chiefly because the capital is one of the world’s most boring cities.” The article included gossipy tales chronicling Perle Mesta’s unlikely rise from a Wild West Texas childhood with a “brash” father who dabbled in real estate, struck oil, and built the largest hotel in Oklahoma City, to her marriage to a self-made Italian Pittsburgh steel magnate, and, after his untimely death, her reinvention as a social-climbing widow who conquered stuffy Newport, Rhode Island, and set her sights on Washington. The nouveau riche hostess changed the spelling of her given name—from Pearl to Perle—because it sounded more sophisticated. She had a knack for ingratiating herself with up-and-coming politicians, befriending Truman when he was a Missouri senator and Dwight Eisenhower as an Army major. By accumulating the “right” guests, a Washington hostess could invisibly pull the strings: whisper useful information into a senator’s ear, help an underling gain a promotion through fortuitous seating, or put legislative opponents together in a congenial setting where, aided by copious champagne, they could forge compromises. Perle Mesta was treated by Time with patronizing amusement, mocked for her weight (“her figure requires stern corseting”) and sense of selfimportance. “Not even her warmest admirers, who like her liveliness, would credit her with overwhelming charm or notable wit,” the story declared. By the time Howard Lindsay got around to reading the several-monthsold magazine in July, Perle had become an even more controversial and polarizing figure. Just a few weeks earlier, Harry Truman had named her as the American envoy to Luxembourg, only the third woman to hold such a high State Department diplomatic post. With a population of 300,000 and situated on 998 square miles, Luxembourg was tiny, but since the country was bordered by Germany, France, and Belgium and with the Cold War reaching an alarming stage, it held tremendous strategic importance. Truman was excoriated for picking a woman who didn’t even have a college degree rather than a seasoned Ivy League–educated man. Naysayers jeered over Perle Mesta’s lack of diplomatic experience, treated her as a punch line to a national joke, and cautioned that she would prove to be an embarrassment.