Jayne Ikard dies; Newsweek bureau chief, D.C. hostess

Jayne Brumley Ikard, a political journalist who served as one of Newsweek magazine's first female bureau chiefs and went on to become a prominent Washington hostess after her marriage to U.S. Rep. Frank Ikard of Texas, died Aug. 27 at the Georgetown Retirement Residence in Washington. She was 83 and had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Mrs. Ikard had been a staple of Washington society since the early 1970s, when she found herself married to a millionaire former congressman after a whirlwind six-week courtship.

She was a frequent partygoer who hosted many events at her home in Kalorama, where invitees included a high-flying mix of politicians, diplomats and journalists. In the less-partisan days of Washington social life, the Ikards -- both Democrats -- were known to entertain guests from across the political spectrum, including President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy.

The Ikards also kept a summer home in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard, where they entertained a who's-who cross-section of the island's famous vacationers. The guests at one of Mrs. Ikard's parties there included opera singer Beverly Sills, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

In 1987, Sally Quinn of The Washington Post asked Mrs. Ikard to share her secrets for a successful dinner.

"You had to run a safe house. The things that were said in your house were not out on the streets the next day," Mrs. Ikard said. "People have to be able to tell the truth in order to have a really good conversation."

Mrs. Ikard reveled in the political discussion of the day, telling Quinn that "the perfect dinner is given on the night of an incredible crisis" and sharing a distaste with out-of-town dinner guests.

"They can't be absorbed into a Washington dinner," Mrs. Ikard said. "They're either slackjawed over the guest list or they think we're kind of mean. They think they've fallen into a bunch of vipers, a snake pit."

She was born Mary Jane Keegan in Boston on Dec. 30, 1926, and grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Walpole, Mass. She changed her name to Jayne because she liked the way it looked. In her high school yearbook, she wrote that her goal was "to be happy" and her hobby was "meeting interesting people."

She graduated from Boston University, where she studied journalism, and then headed West. While working at the Lubbock Avalanche Journal newspaper in Texas, she met fellow journalist Calvin Brumley. They were married from 1951 until his death in 1972.

Survivors include their son, Bryan Brumley of Portland, Ore.; and two grandsons.

The couple followed Calvin Brumley's career to Denver, New York, Jacksonville, Fla., and Boston, where Mrs. Ikard began writing a column for the Boston Herald. In 1964, she became head of the Boston bureau of Newsweek.

She continued working for Newsweek until 1969, covering national political stories, including Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's campaign for president and his funeral. Using deep ties she had cultivated over years of summering on Martha's Vineyard, she also wrote about the aftermath of Sen. Edward Kennedy's incident at Chappaquiddick, in which he drove his car off a bridge into the water and his female passenger died.

In 1969, Mrs. Ikard was appointed director of public relations for the newly created President's Council on Environmental Quality. After her husband died, she wrote in a story in the Saturday Evening Post, she was determined "to become the best informed female international environmentalist."

It was with that goal in mind that she traveled to Stockholm for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, where she took part in her first demonstration.

She was marching through the streets of Stockholm, holding a bouquet of lilies of the valley and a sign emblazoned with a silver whale, when she was first spotted by Frank Ikard.

Ikard, a widower who had served in Congress in the 1950s and early 1960s and at the time was president of the American Petroleum Institute, was also in town for the environmental conference. He was peeved when the trip from the airport to his hotel was interrupted by a protest on behalf of whales. He was not amused by the woman carrying flowers and a marine-mammal poster.

They weren't properly introduced until the next day, when they went to dinner with friends. The next night, on a whim, the pair flew to Copenhagen for dinner.

"We talked and we talked and we talked, with me acting as though I'd taken some kind of truth serum," Mrs. Ikard later wrote. "I even told him my age, my correct age, before the first course."

They were married just weeks later in a spur-of-the-moment ceremony in Austin a few hours after Ikard introduced her to his old friends, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. The former president took the couple on a tour of his ranch in his signature white Lincoln.

When he heard of their plans to marry, he provided the keys to one of his ranch homes for the night and gave the couple their first wedding present: a pair of silver mint julep cups with his initials stamped on the bottom.

"In all of these rushing, memorable hours, LBJ was completely in character. Everything I had heard and read about him was true," Mrs. Ikard wrote. "At least I could appreciate the full dimension of this remarkable man -- his warmth, his enthusiasm, his overwhelming sense of person."

The newlyweds returned to Washington, where they lived together until Ikard's death in 1991. In their Kalorama Square townhouse hung a framed memory of their first meeting -- the silver-whale poster Mrs. Ikard had carried in the Stockholm protest.