“The Woman Who Knew Everyone: The Power of Perle Mesta, Washington’s Most Famous Hostess,” By Meryl Gordon. Grand Central. 485 pages. $34 Grand Central

In her mid-20th-century heyday, Perle Mesta inspired Irving Berlin’s “Call Me Madam,” a Broadway musical satirizing an American socialite’s posting as a European ambassador. The show drew conspicuously on Mesta’s reputation as “The Hostess With the Mostes’.” Characteristically, Mesta embraced the production and befriended its star, Ethel Merman.

Renowned for her lavish bipartisan shindigs, Mesta was more than Washington’s premiere party giver. She became the confidante of three American presidents, the United States envoy to Luxembourg (the fictional Lichtenburg in Berlin’s musical), a passionate advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment and a civil rights supporter who helped to integrate Harry S. Truman’s 1949 inaugural festivities.

Meryl Gordon’s sympathetic and involving new biography, “The Woman Who Knew Everyone,” rescues Mesta from near-obscurity and does her distinctive life justice, underlining its subject’s own assessment: “My life is not just party, party, all the time.”

The hostess first captured public attention during the Depression, when the country needed a distraction. “There was a fascination that a hick from the sticks could make it in America’s most rarefied environments,” Gordon writes. “In this pre-feminist era, she symbolized freedom, a style setter who could do what she wanted without the protection or support of a man.”

The parties, which Gordon gamely details, often had a political rationale, connecting Washington power players and advancing Mesta’s pet causes. For decades, no presidential nominating convention seemed complete without them. Unmissable extravaganzas, they featured topflight Broadway and Hollywood entertainment. Mesta’s prodigious, seemingly compulsive hosting may also have been an effort to abate her loneliness, Gordon suggests.

Writing a biography required stripping away some of the myths that its subject helped to create. Mesta, who died in 1975 at 92, lied repeatedly about her antecedents and her age (obituaries pegged her at 85). She even changed the spelling of her name from Pearl, which she found less cosmopolitan. Her contemporaries are long gone. But Gordon, the author of gossipy biographies of other society figures (“Mrs. Astor Regrets,” “Bunny Mellon”), tracked down relatives and younger friends who confirmed Mesta’s affability and generosity.

Perle Mesta at a party given by Nikita Khrushchev for President Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the Russian Embassy in Washington. Library of Congress

Born in Michigan, Mesta spent much of her childhood in Texas, where Gordon reports that she gave her first party at age 11. But she was most intimately associated with Oklahoma, where she lived in her 20s. Oklahoma City today has a Perle Mesta Park and a Perle Mesta restaurant promising an “impeccable dining experience that captures the spirit of our ever-charming, ever-prepared namesake.”

Family mattered to Mesta, as did her Christian Science beliefs, which made her a teetotaler. Her mother died in 1908, when Perle was 25. She had a younger brother, O.W., and was particularly close to her younger sister, Marguerite, with whom she shared entertaining duties and residences in Washington; New York; Newport, Rhode Island; and Arizona. Their father, William Skirvin, an oil and real estate magnate, was a “likable schemer and dreamer” who played loose with family investments and ended up in sprawling, Dickensian litigation with his own children.

Mesta’s allure for the capital’s powerful resided at least partly in her openhearted personality. “Her smile, her warmth, and her genuine interest in others would be the draw,” Gordon writes. An aspiring performer, Mesta had no education beyond high school and no profession (though McCall’s magazine paid her handsome sums to chronicle her social whirl). Her rivals and other skeptics — notably Washington hostess Gwen Cafritz and Eleanor Roosevelt — disdained her, until they, too, were won over.

A family friend introduced Perle to George Mesta, a Pittsburgh-based steel tycoon two decades her senior, and they wed in 1917. Mesta would later insist that George was her one great love. After he died in 1925 of an apparent heart attack, she dated but never remarried.

Mesta studied the rhythms of Washington’s hierarchical social life with “an anthropologist’s intensity” and cultivated the press assiduously. It helped that she came from money and married into yet more money. And that she was willing to spend it on entertaining — so much so that she had nearly exhausted her millions by the time she died.

Among presidential couples, Mesta was particularly close to the Trumans, who shared her heartland background and unpretentiousness. Their daughter, Margaret, was a regular at her parties. Mesta even tried to match her with John Fitzgerald Kennedy, then a dashing and wealthy Massachusetts congressman.

Truman, valuing Mesta’s loyalty and people skills, appointed her as ambassador to the tiny but strategically important Luxembourg. After some initial blunders, she thrived there, despite the efforts of (male) U.S. Foreign Service professionals to undercut her. Throughout her life, Mesta faced misogyny on numerous fronts, including press sniping about her “more than ample bulk.”

One of her great gifts was recognizing political talent. She nurtured friendships with the Eisenhowers long before Ike’s presidency. The warmth remained even after Eisenhower ousted her, for partisan reasons, from her Luxembourg post. She was powerfully drawn to Lyndon B. Johnson, backing him for president in 1960. “He’s really so very tender,” she once said. Mesta was so disappointed when Johnson accepted second billing to Kennedy that she threw her support to Richard M. Nixon.

Not surprisingly, Mesta was persona non grata at the Kennedy White House. After the assassination, with LBJ in power, her star rose again. The Nixons waxed hot and cold; she merited an invite to a state dinner for the shah of Iran but was shut out of Tricia Nixon’s White House wedding.

As Gordon describes her, Mesta was the perennial comeback kid. Whenever her social wave seemed to have crested, there was another political realignment around the corner. The biography doesn’t elide Mesta’s missteps, from her enthusiasm for former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to her occasional style faux pas. But in the end, readers are likely to find Mesta as endearing as her many party guests did.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.