Description: She has dined, danced, and dished with presidents, princes, kings, cabinet members, congressional leaders, and ambassadors for almost half a century as the most widely-read Washington society columnist in history. Her weekly column, "Betty Beale's Washington", delighted, informed - and occasionally infuriated - readers of more than 90 newspapers nationwide. Her four-times-a-week column in Washington's Evening Star was obligatory reading in Powertown, both for the nuggets that told the mighty who said what to whom and where, and for the scoops that made headlines all over America. Her legendary closeness to First Families and other top newsmakers is still the envy of hard-news journalists. "I don't like talking to reporters, but I'll talk to her", Chief Justice Warren Burger told Betty at a party thrown in her honor by Clare Booth Luce. And Time magazine "easily the best society columnist in town, and in the country". Now here, at last, are the memoirs of Betty Beale - lively; candid, generous, opinionated, glamorous, intimate, entertaining, and revealing. In Power at Play she takes you to glittering evenings at the White House; shares her love affair with one of the nation's most respected politicians, and her friendships with the most fascinating men and women of the era; invites you to her at-home dinners for presidents and their wives; reveals her feuds with White House staffers through the years; takes you inside royal palaces and billionaires' hideaways; and illuminates the private side of the most public, and most powerful, people in the world. Only Betty Beale could have written Power at Play. A consummate insider, she was weaned on politics and politesse in Washington as thegranddaughter of a Tennessee congressman long before becoming the pace-setting writer who hit 500 power parties a year. Her life story, her early-blooming career and feminist grit, and her happy role as socialite wife and hostess is delightful, inspiring - and an awful lot of fun. Not since Dolly Madison has a woman watched Power at Play so intimately - or earned such a unique, close-up view of Washington from the top down, and from the inside out.

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