The Iranian Mission in New York City is presented in the diary not simply as an embassy but as the New York home of Fereydoun Hoveyda, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. It recurs as a setting for dinners and receptions where diplomatic business, cultural connections, and the obligations of a crowded social calendar overlap. The diarist’s visits show the venue’s shifting character: at one gathering it is an intimate residence, at another a jammed buffet, and at another the stage for his growing suspicion that Iranian hosts expect political help from their American guests.

Identity and Setting

The diary makes an important distinction between the place’s public label and its physical setting. Introducing a dinner there, the diarist corrects his own shorthand: it is not really the embassy, but the home of Hoveyda, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations. The entry offers no street address or architectural description. Instead, the Mission is defined through use: a private residence repeatedly opened for diplomatic entertaining, where officials, artists, and society figures meet around the dinner table.

That domestic setting gives the gatherings a personal quality without removing their political context. Guests arrive by cab, take their places at dinners or buffets, and encounter one another through introductions and conversation. The residence functions as a meeting point, but the diary records it from the perspective of a guest moving through New York’s social obligations, not as an official account of the Iranian diplomatic establishment.

Dinners and Receptions

At one dinner, the diarist speaks with China Machado, who says she has known Hoveyda for a decade or more, dating back to the period when Hoveyda and her husband were among French filmmakers in the 1960s. Their conversation turns to the photographer Avedon: Machado criticizes his habit of getting what he wants from a person and then dropping them. The diarist agrees, only to have the other guests tell him that he behaves the same way. The Mission’s dining room thus becomes a place where judgments about professional conduct quickly turn back on the speaker.

On another visit, Bob Colacello insists that the diarist wear black tie. They discover that they are the only guests dressed formally, and Colacello explains that they had been invited to so many parties that he had forgotten the distinction. The dinner honors the Swedish ambassador. Yet the evening is shadowed by the diarist’s sense that the Iranian hosts are making use of their connections. He links this feeling to an earlier realization in Washington: Ambassador Zahedi, associated with Nixon and Ford, is no longer close to Jimmy Carter’s administration and now wants access to Democrats. The diarist believes that this political repositioning is why the Iranians need help from people like him and Colacello. The formality of the dinner therefore sits beside an uneasy assessment of who is courting whom, and for what purpose.

A later buffet, held in honor of the incoming American ambassador to Italy, Mr. Gardner, and his wife Danielle, is described as jammed. Hoveyda attempts to extricate the diarist from a conversation with the Baroness de Bodisco by inviting her upstairs to meet someone. She refuses. Hoveyda tells her that she will not be invited back; she replies that she does not care. In this brief exchange, the residence’s social machinery becomes visible: the host manages introductions and future invitations, but the guest can reject the terms of that hospitality.

Guests, Preferences, and Conversation

The Mission also hosts a dinner for Paulette Goddard. Colacello has prepared the guest list and seating, but the diarist says that the evening has been arranged according to Goddard’s wishes. He finds the guest selection dull, complaining that she has invited her own friends rather than interesting people or beauties. The meal nevertheless offers plenty of fresh caviar. His account sets personal taste against the practical work of hosting: the list and seating are organized, the guest of honor’s preferences are met, and the diarist judges the result by the company and food.

On another evening, the diarist picks up Andrea Portago and takes her to the Mission. Paulette Goddard is there, and the conversation includes the sale of the rights to a novel by Erich Maria Remarque about Andrea’s father, the racing driver Fon de Portago. Goddard has received $100,000 plus 10 percent of the film proceeds from Paramount; the film is now called Bobby Deerfield and stars Al Pacino as Fon de Portago. The account places a concrete piece of film-industry business inside the diplomatic residence’s social world, where a dinner guest’s family story is also material for a major studio adaptation.

The Mission in the Diary’s Social Geography

Across these visits, the Iranian Mission in New York City is less a backdrop than a recurring junction in the diarist’s life: one stop among dinners, openings, and parties, but one where hospitality repeatedly brings political and professional relations into the same room. Its gatherings range from a dinner that prompts an argument about how people treat one another, to a formal evening that leaves the diarist feeling politically useful, to a crowded buffet where an invitation is openly refused.

The diary does not describe the residence’s rooms in detail. What it preserves instead are the arrangements and exchanges that make the place legible: who is honored, who sets the guest list, who is expected to help whom, and who can afford not to care about being invited again. The Mission’s significance emerges through repetition. Each return adds a different register to the same setting—diplomatic courtesy, social judgment, political calculation, or business conversation—without reducing the venue to any one of them.