Geoff George
In 1980s Washington if you wanted to dine with celebrities, political leaders and other movers and shakers – Henry Kissinger, Ethel Kennedy, Barbara Walters, Wayne Gretzky, Donald Sutherland – the place to be was the Canadian embassy.
The official host was Allan Gotlieb, the erudite, bookish Canadian ambassador and confidant of prime minister Pierre Trudeau. But the social dynamo behind the legendary events at the ambassador’s residence on Rock Creek Drive was his wife, Sondra Gotlieb, a newspaper columnist, novelist, humorist and self-styled “salonista.”
Eccentric, witty, charming and occasionally outrageous, Ms. Gotlieb, who died in Toronto on Jan. 21 at the age of 89, carved out an extraordinary role for herself as a diplomatic wife in the place she dubbed “Power Town.” The Wall Street Journal called the Gotliebs “the hottest diplomatic couple in town.” But her personal foibles also got her into trouble.
“The first ladies of some embassies serve tea and sympathy but Sondra Gotlieb, the Canadian ambassador’s wife, dishes out jabs and jibes,” according to a profile that appeared in a Washington business magazine when the Gotliebs were at the peak of their influence. Katharine Graham, the renowned publisher of The Washington Post, said she never turned down an invitation, noting that, “Of all the embassies I’ve ever been to, the Gotliebs were the only ones to run an intellectual salon.”
“Allan could not have done in Washington what he did do, without her,” said Jeremy Kinsman, a top political officer at the embassy in the 1980s who went on to a distinguished ambassadorial career himself. “She was a refreshing counterpoint to him, who didn’t have a natural, person-to-person charisma.”
Her notoriety only expanded when she began writing a satirical column in The Washington Post about the life of a hostess in Washington. Fashioned as a series of gossipy letters to a friend called Beverly back in Canada, recounting the adventures of fictional characters like the “dusty diplomat” Baron Spitte and the lobbyist Joe Promisall.
Allan and Sondra Gotlieb in October, 2007.Janice Pinto/The Globe and Mail
At the embassy, the interplay between the Gotliebs was at times the stuff of a comedy routine. Patrick Gossage, the embassy’s press secretary, explained that Sondra didn’t hesitate interrupting her husband when he was giving one of his well-prepared toasts. “He worked hard on them and she would always interrupt, contradicting him or telling him he had gone on too long.”
But she also made fun of herself. When it came to art, she admitted to an old-fashioned taste for “pictures that tell a story,” rather than more modern works. “All right, so I like Rockwell better than Rothko.”
“You don’t want to be stuffy but you have to realize you can’t open your big mouth all the time,” Ms. Gotlieb once told an interviewer, advice she had trouble keeping herself. “I want to enjoy myself. I’m a hedonist. I’ve never taken myself seriously.”
The Gotliebs arrived in Washington in 1981 under the Trudeau government but their success at putting Canada on the social and political map for senators and cabinet members in the Reagan era earned Mr. Gotlieb an unexpected extension after the Progressive Conservatives returned to power under Brian Mulroney in 1984.
But it all went sour during an evening in March of 1986, when the Gotliebs were set to hold a massive dinner party in honour of a visiting Mr. Mulroney. U.S. vice-president George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush were late, so other guests were invited to move to the garden while an agitated Ms. Gotlieb awaited the Bushes’ arrival at the front door.
As Sondra cooled her heels, she asked her social secretary, Connie Connor, why another prominent guest hadn’t arrived. When told that he had cancelled, Ms. Gotlieb slapped Ms. Connor across the face, who ran off in tears.
The embassy issued an apology. What didn’t help was the later admission by Elizabeth Gray, the CBC journalist, that she too had been victim of a slap from Sondra several years earlier, at a party in Ottawa. “To this day, I don’t know why she did it. Sondra’s eccentric,” Ms. Gray said. “Everyone knows that. I did not see it as a big deal.” That’s not the way others saw it. The embassy slap was front-page news on both sides of the border, with The Globe and Mail opining about the incident in an editorial titled “A Costly Slap.”
Writing about the incident several years later, Sally Quinn, the leading Washington columnist and hostess, said the incident was proof that Ms. Gotlieb was ill-suited for her role. “If you’re too highly strung, you can get strung up,” she wrote in The New Yorker, noting that the incident “put a sudden, brutal end to Sondra Gotlieb’s career as a successful hostess.”
Asked about the incident in 1990, Ms. Gotlieb downplayed it. “It wasn’t a big story,” she told the CBC, calling it a “tiny incident that was not public,” forgetting the presence of the press. She explained that the real problem was that she was trying to lose weight. “I had bought a nice red dress and I was determined to be able to squeeze into it that night. I didn’t eat all day.” Stressed out, she exploded.
Mr. and Ms. Gotlieb in May, 1986./The Canadian Press
Sondra Anne Kaufman was born in Winnipeg on Dec. 30, 1936, the second of two children of David Kaufman, an agricultural chemist, and his wife, Fanny, a housewife. She grew up in the city’s North End, home of the city’s small but striving Jewish community.
At 17, she was introduced to Allan Gotlieb, the brilliant son of the wealthy Gotlieb family from the city’s more prosperous South End, who was seven years her senior. Allan had graduated from Harvard Law School and was teaching at Oxford.
Sondra later told Globe and Mail columnist Jan Wong she had been anxious to leave home and that the Gotliebs “had a much grander house. … I got married for all the wrong reasons. I wasn’t in love with my husband. I had a crush on someone else.”
She dropped out of University of Manitoba and got married in 1955, fearing the worst. She was 18. “But once we got to Oxford, we somehow fell in love.”
Ms. Gotlieb wrote about the experience years later in a comic novel, True Confections, Or How My Family Arranged My Marriage, which won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1979. As for her own marriage, it also proved a success, lasting 64 years until Allan’s death in 2020.
“They adored each other,” daughter Rachel Gotlieb, a museum curator in Toronto, told The Globe. “She definitely was his muse.”
Marc Gotlieb, the Gotliebs’ son and a professor of art history at Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass., explained that it was “a definite partnership where there was a constant intertwining of their mutual careers and their marriage.”
After Mr. Gotlieb joined the Department of External Affairs, the family moved to Geneva and then to Ottawa, where Mr. Gotlieb began his meteoric rise in the federal public service as deputy minister for communications, then immigration and eventually external affairs. With three children at home, Ms. Gotlieb began working as a food writer and was an early editor of the popular guide Where to Eat in Canada. She later wrote two cookbooks.
The Gotliebs quickly became known for their dinner parties, where Sondra would be the chef of memorable meals and the guest list always included the top of the top. She recalled in her memoir one particular dinner in the 1970 when Mr. Trudeau brought along a young date, Margaret Sinclair.
“She was 21 and the most ravishing woman I had ever seen, a black-haired Marilyn Monroe, so beautiful even the most politically obsessed people at the party stood and gaped at her.” Also in attendance was Leonard Cohen, with whom the future Mrs. Trudeau “spent a large part of the evening touching fingers and twining her legs around him.”
Later asked about her almost 20 years in Ottawa, Ms. Gotlieb commented wryly, “Were we social climbers? The ladder in Ottawa had very few rungs.”
After leaving Washington and the diplomatic service in 1989, the Gotliebs moved to the tony Rosedale neighbourhood of Toronto, where Allan joined a law firm and became a corporate director. The couple hung out with the Westons, the Eatons and other members of the Toronto establishment.
Former U.S. president Ronald Regan with Ms. and Mr. Gotlieb at the White House, in December, 1981.Barry Thumma/The Associated Press
Yet she continued to take potshots at the wealthy in columns for The Globe and The National Post. Lampooning the Bata Shoe Museum, Ms. Gotlieb proposed a “Sondra Sock Exchange” that would feature socks through history, including a special room for “the leftover, mismatched, shrunken socks from the clothes dryers of famous people.”
When she had a facelift at 64, she turned it into a five-part series in The National Post. Spilling the beans to Jan Wong of the rival Globe, she explained. “I told them over and over I didn’t want to look face-lifted. I just wanted to get rid of the gunk” and to erase her “three double chins.”
She also pooh-poohed the contemporary preoccupation with healthy lifestyles. Her children recalled their Mom favouring a cigar. Writing in 2014, Ms. Gotlieb expressed nostalgia for less puritanical times. “Oh, how I miss the days of hard liquor. Wine’s fine, but please offer me a stiff drink,” she wrote.
“Many regarded Sondra as an eccentric socialite, but her personality was much more complex,” said Matthew Fraser, who was married to the Gotliebs’ late daughter Rebecca, and praised Sondra as a welcoming person and generous grandmother. “She was deep down quite an anxious person who lacked the self-assurance that many believed she possessed.”
Mr. Fraser, the former editor-in-chief of The National Post, said that “Sondra’s relationship with her husband Allan was an extravagant ritual of mutual dependence. They were profoundly complicit and Allan patiently indulged Sondra’s eccentricities and vices.”
Ms. Gotlieb loved gardening and dogs. Both she and her husband were huge fans of the Victorian era. Sondra devoured the works of Thackeray, Trollope and Eliot, while Allan became a major collector of the works of James Tissot, a painter and illustrator. The couple donated their extensive Tissot collection to the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Ms. Gotlieb leaves her children Marc and Rachel, and six grandchildren. Her daughter Rebecca died in 2003.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.