The Grand House in the Movie
The grand house in the movie for the Washington party scenes is called Tregaron and it still looks very much the same as it did in 1962.
The house was built in 1912 for the Parmalee family and was originally called The Causeway. It sits on a 20 acre site in the middle of Washington. But the owners who made the estate famous were the second owners, Ambassador Joseph Davies and his wife Marjorie Merriwether Post. Mrs. Davies was probably the 2nd or 3rd richest woman in America, and the last person to live the life of the Guilded Age. Mrs. Davies had an apartment in New York on 5th Ave. with over fifty rooms spread over two floors. She had her winter estate in Florida that is called Mar-a-Lago, a Spanish baroque fantasy with 126 rooms that took a staff of over 60 workers to maintain. (http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YGstphdOKb0/SCdyHiOOa1I/AAAAAAAAEwQ/ZUNpNtXj9-s/s400/Mar+a+Lago.jpg)
She had a camp in the Adirondacks called Top Ridge that has over forty buildings in it. (one building picture here, the famed boat house - http://www.essential-architecture.com/IMAGES/Topridge_Boathouse2.jpg)
She had her home on Long Island called Hillwood, a Georgian palace, now the site of C.W. Post University. To top this off, she owned the largest sailing yacht ever privately owned, the 356' long (yes, 356') yacht The Sea Cloud. The Sea Cloud was triple masted sailing ship for fore-sails and sails in the aft capable of sailing across the ocean easily. (http://www.cruisecritic.com/reviews/reviewpop.cfm?image=seacloud03.jpg&caption=At%20Sea&ShipID=404&pic=3)
Mrs. Davies lived a kind of life that was once common for the super rich in the 1890 to 1920's. But the Great Depression and the income tax, as well as changing social customs ended that. But not for her. She continued to live the grand life into the 1970's. She had married E.F. Hutton in the 1920's and together they took her fortune and multiplied it over several times. I believe that not only did she not lose money in the Depression, she seemed to prosper during it. She was one of the best businesswomen in the US, at a time when women were not supposed to be involved in business. Only Doris Duke of her generation rivaled her in business sense. She truly was the last of a breed, and the house you see in Advise and Consent was a part of that life. When she died in 1974 her estate was valued at over $250 million, which is about one billion dollars in today's money, and this is after she had given away large amounts to charity.
Tregaron was the couple's estate in Washington and Mrs. Davies turned it into her party house for the nations capital. While Mr. Davies was our first Ambassador to the Soviet Union, the couple bought on the cheap treasures from Russia's czarist past, which on their return they filled Tregaron with. Mrs. Davies made a special Icon Room for their collection of Russian decorative art, including the famed Orlov diamond and several Faberge eggs. Mrs. Davies most famous parties were her spring garden parties, which were timed by her Scottish gardener to be at the peak bloom of the over two thousand azaleas. At formal parties, Mrs. Davies would pick from a jewelry collection worth tens of millions of dollars, including a heart shaped blue diamond necklace and tiara owned by Empress Josephine, the wife of Napoleon. Mrs. Davies built a Russian style dacha at Tregaron as a private office for her husband.
The couple divorced in 1956 and Mrs. Davies went back to using her maiden name of Marjorie Merriwether Post. Upon her divorce she had workers come at night and ripped up the two-thousand azaleas from Tregaron to take them to her new Washington home, also called Hillwood. It is at Hillwood now that you can see her portrait of Catherine the Great, the Orlov diamond, the Faberge eggs and countless other Imperial Russian and French items.
Hillwood is now a musuem. Mar-a-Lago belonged to Donald Trump for a while but now is a private club. Camp Top Ridge in the Adirondacks is privately owned. The Sea Cloud is now open as a charter yacht.
Joe Davies had a daughter who lived at Tregaron named Eleanor Davies Tydings Ditzen who became the grand dame of Washington society in her own right. Besides being the daughter of ambassador Davies and his first wife, her husband was a US Senator and governor of Maryland, and her son also became a Senator from Maryland. Mrs. Ditzen died in 2006 at the age of 102. Her daughter won the Miss America contest and her granddaughter is the actress Alexandra Tydings, who played Aphrodite on the Xena TV show. I know her through a friend of mine, and when I found this out I said, "So her mother's Miss America and she's Aphrodite?" and he said yes. She's now married and retired from acting and lives in DC near the old Tregaron estate of her grandmother.
It was after the divorce and the death of Joe Davies that Tregaron was used to film Advise and Consent. Many of the Davies family were used as extras in the party scenes. Later in the 1960's Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his family lived in the gardeners house at Tregaron. The estate is now used as the Washington International School, a private school that brings in kids from diverse backgrounds. The movie The Pelican Brief was filmed there more recently.
Tregaron looks very much as it did in Advise and Consent. The grounds are currently being restored to something that approaches what they were when the Davies lived there.