A Tasty Dish
At the State Department Dinner, Even the Stars Get Starry-Eyed

By Darragh Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 4, 2006

"Helloooo, Dolly!" sang the chorus of photographers, their moods as jubilant as Dolly Parton's brisk bounce down the red carpet at the State Department dinner on the eve of last night's Kennedy Center Honors gala.

Except -- the country music star wasn't slowing down. She was supposed to slow down. And stop.

"Not too far," one of the photographers cautioned.

"No!" the country star retorted, finally halting and leaning forward flirtatiously. "He said to the 'X' " -- she pointed to the black tape under her heels -- "and that's the 'X.' " The lower half of her face cracked into a wide Joker's grin, the upper half remaining frozen as a photo. Flashes popped. Sparks flared from the sequins of her black velvet dress.

When Parton heard she would be one of the 29th annual Kennedy Center Honors recipients, joining musical theater composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, conductor Zubin Mehta, Motown legend Smokey Robinson and filmmaker Steven Spielberg, she "immediately went to work on the clothes," she said, telling her designer, Robert Bahar, "I have to look good, and I have to look like me. I want to look like Frederick's of Dollywood."

She calls her very low-cut dress and its accompanying bolero "my version of a tuxedo, with boobs out."

This was upstairs, just past the State Department receiving line where Condoleezza Rice -- emerald gown, big smile -- was welcoming everyone, with the honorees basking in this clubby, intimate and exclusive venue where the arts world's biggest stars and Washington's brightest bulbs celebrate together on the night before the grand and much more public gala.

Behind Parton was Aretha Franklin, who had just plucked three egg rolls from a passing tray and was drinking a Coke. Her fur wrap was flung across her high-backed chair. "Oh, Ms. Franklin!" squeaked Steven Spielberg's wife, Kate Capshaw, as she walked past. "How are you?"

Even the stars get starry-eyed at this black-tie, silk-gowned, stiletto-heeled, double-take-whiplash-inducing affair: There's George Lucas and Itzhak Perlman and Ted Kennedy and Barbara Walters and Michele Lee (from "Knots Landing") and Shania Twain.

Shania Twain! Zubin Mehta's young granddaughter Shenaya was excited to meet her, telling the crossover country star that they share the same name. Which prompted Twain to ask the granddaughter of the former director of the New York Philharmonic if she was named after her, a songstress whose hit list includes "Man! I Feel Like a Woman." Shenaya Chinoy said she answered, after a brief pause: No.

The star-studdery was everywhere. Natasha Richardson confessed that although the formal dinner -- crab cakes with avocado salsa, rack of lamb, chestnut potato puree, corn bread plus three wines (all fabulous) and, for dessert, chocolate coffee baked Alaska (not fabulous) and demitasse -- is a quintessentially grown-up evening, "it's making me feel like a 15-year-old, and I want to go around with my autograph book."

Franklin had come to celebrate, she said, "my oldest, dearest friend" -- Smokey Robinson, who grew up a block away from her in Detroit, where they were "childhood friends, sandbox friends." Back then, said the Queen of Soul and 1994 Honors recipient, "we sang a lot. People in Detroit like to sing. There was a group on every corner: Everyone aspired to be a singer." She took another bite of egg roll and said, "The way they play basketball now is the way we came up singing."

Robinson's hair curls around his face like a corona, and his turquoise eyes are as mesmerizing as his voice. "In one word," he said, "this is awesome." Later in the evening he was lauded by Richardson: "When Smokey sang, people got together. Babies were made." Or, as Motown Records founder Berry Gordy puts it, "He has touched people in places they had never been touched before."

Spielberg, describing himself as "ebullient," said, "When I got the official letter, it came to my office. I had them read it to me three times to make sure there wasn't a typo. So few filmmakers have been honored."

The drinks were served in big goblets, like fishbowls on skinny stems, and Webber was having trouble with his, getting jostled by the throngs. "It's great to have an American award like this," he said, then disappeared into the jostlers.

Right behind him, Mehta -- this year's other non-American honoree (he was born in Mumbai and is, he said, "still Indian") -- was reaching out as his dear friend Elaine Wolfensohn walked past and touched her sumptuous stole.

"This is from my country!" he exulted, rubbing the fabric lightly between his fingers. "Wow! Wow! Wow! It's super pashmina." He invited us to touch it, too -- but "without the pen," he admonished sternly. The shawl was softer than a puppy's ear, and as for the embroidery: "Just look at this work!" he said. "People go blind doing this."

"You have a good eye," Wolfensohn said and stroked Mehta's cheek. Her husband, Jim Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, would be doing Mehta's toast later in the evening.

At the far end of the room, Liam Neeson asked a waiter to bring him a glass of pinot noir. A tall and peevish presence, dressed like a funeral director, he was telling us he couldn't talk about Spielberg. Just listen to the four-minute speech I'll be giving tomorrow, he said. (It is a speech, by the way, that in rehearsal focused a lot on Neeson. Just saying.)

We asked about "Schindler's List." Is there really anything about Spielberg that he hasn't already written into a short speech?

"Schindler's List," Neeson said, almost with a sneer, "is not an anecdotal movie. It's really not. But we were a band of brothers." And we were dismissed.

Across the room, Tom Hanks was talking opera with Verdi baritone Sherrill Milnes -- comparing Shakespeare's "Othello" with Verdi's "Otello" -- and exchanging greetings with Ted Kennedy -- "We're going to be sitting at the same table," Hanks told the senator -- then took a moment to describe Spielberg as ("and I mean this in the best of all possible ways") "a machine. . . . He's never doing anything but movies. That's the way his DNA was created."

By 11 p.m., after the honorees received their medals, it was time to take the "class picture" (professional photographer unhappy that everyone in the room was snapping, too, messing up his flash) and get into the limos.

Perhaps the meaning of the whole night -- the whole weekend, and of the arts themselves -- was best summed up by Alison Krauss, who toasted Parton and made her cry when she said: "Dolly, you make me want to be somebody."

Staff writer Anita Huslin contributed to this report.