Bader howar biography

Back when Lyndon B. Johnson was president and the latest dance craze was the Frug, Washington high society was transfixed by Barbara Howar, a sparkling socialite from North Carolina who helped the first lady do her hair, mingled with a visiting Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon and turned her Georgetown home into a center of Swinging Sixties entertainment.

Ms. Howar (her last name rhymed with “flower”) declared that she had little interest in being seen as Washington’s “No. 1 hostess” — not least because the label meant that “clever, fun people avoid you.”

Defiantly unorthodox, she wore pajamas to an embassy gala, drove an orange motorcycle through a Georgetown park and had a barbed wit that brought her a reputation as the enfant terrible of the capital’s social scene.

Reflecting on the private life of Henry Kissinger, one of many diplomats and politicians who frequented her parties over the years, she quipped, “Henry’s idea of sex is to slow the car down to 30 miles an hour