Astonish, Bewilder and Stupefy

Smoki has been described in the pages of the Boston Globe as a �legendary Back Bay socialite,� a �socialite superhostess� and �Boston�s Perle Mesta.� She is a 70 plus year old woman with long white hair and the biggest glasses you have ever seen. A fixture on the Boston social scene and a board member for charities too numerous to mention, she and her husband also produce and host a local cable TV show entitled �The Literati Scene.� They videotape interviews with authors and other luminaries at the Swann Caf� at Boston�s Park Plaza Hotel, each operating the camera for the other. After the interviews are done, they sit down for a luncheon with their guests. It�s most civilized�sort of a Boston version of the roundtable at the Algonquin. I appeared on the show in 2003 and will be taping another interview in a few weeks. When I was on the first time, I thought, �God, why is my publicist sending me to this local cable show.� As it turned out, I had a delightful time�and was surprised at the number of people who later saw it. At lunch afterwards, the person who sat next to me was William Taubman, an Amherst College professor who had just written a biography of Nikita Khrushchev. A few months later he won they Pulitzer Prize for it. You never know who you�ll meet when you hang out with Smoki.

Every September, Smoki and Dick hold a big party for all the folks who have appeared on the show, and a passel of old friends as well. I�ve been to three of these bashes, and each one is a trip. There is no other venue in my life where I can converse with the former ambassador to Pakistan, chat up the authors of a new diet book, exchange cards with a jazz pianist performing next month at New York�s Lincoln center, and listen in as bow tied Harvard grads recall their classmates from the Class of 51�all in the space of a few minutes. Then there�s house itself�chock full with an eclectic mix of books and antiques, and pictures�omigod, millions of pictures of Smoki and Dick, and autographed photos of everyone from Babe Ruth to Kitty Carlisle.

Upon meeting Smoki, I assumed she was a 7th generation Brahmin, born to the breed, old money all the way, and yet it isn�t so. According to the Boston Globe, she was born �Adelaide Ruth Ginepra, the daughter of impecunious parents of Italian and Scottish heritage.� Her mother, says Smoki, was a battered woman who threw her father out. They barely scraped by until she graduated from Brookline High in 1945. She married a man named Ed Bacon (the Bacons being an old time Boston family) in 1957. Then, according to the Globe, she �began her quest for fun and fulfillment in the tricky world of Boston society, which in those days was dominated by a notoriously exclusive class of rich Anglo-Saxon Protestants.�

Her life hasn�t always been easy. In 1974, her husband died from cyanide poisoning. Smoki maintains to this day that he was murdered by his business partner, who is currently serving a life sentence for another murder. The insurance company, according to the Boston Globe, �claimed he committed suicide because he was miserable over his wife's social activities, her insistence on living in town and her refusal to cook at home. (The family joke has been: If you want to get away from Mother, go to the kitchen; she never goes there.)�

Over the years she has gotten into the society columns scads of times, and her parties are legendary. One year, when people simply wouldn�t leave, she began ringing a loud bell and walking room-to-room announcing last call. She and her second husband, Dick Concannon (who she met at a Harvard reunion) have also raised done a huge amount of fundraising for local charities. Every year she acts as a surrogate mother to a couple of foreign students at Harvard. (I find this particularly heartwarming, since my mother did the same thing foreign students at Brown).

I love these parties, I really do. Every August the invitation comes in the mail, and every September I show up. I will continue to go as long as Smoki continues to invite me. I get to meet interesting people, the company is unfailingly pleasant, and I always leave with a glow, knowing that I have been briefly admitted to a world I usually can only read about on the society pages, and what�s more, I have affirmed for another year my tenuous claim to being part of Boston�s �Literati Scene.�