Barbara Howar, a bestselling author, TV interviewer and "gleefully nonconformist fixture of the Washington social scene," died August 2, the New York Times reported. She was 89. By her 30s, Howar had already become known in Washington as a successful hostess, but it was Laughing All the Way, her irreverent 1973 memoir, that put her on the map.
Laughing All the Way spent months on the Times bestseller list. People magazine called Howar "one of the most uninhibited, outspoken women in Washington." The book also "put her on television," the Times noted. "There she was on The Tonight Show, chatting with Johnny Carson about a minor bad-boy-on-staff scandal within the Jimmy Carter administration and suggesting that 'the media kind of controls everything.' "
Howar followed Laughing All the Way with a novel, Making Ends Meet (1976), about a divorcée who works as a Washington film critic.
Nora Ephron's book Crazy Salad (1975) included a chapter on Howar, adapted from her Esquire article, "Crazy Ladies I," which described Laughing All the Way as "almost a case study of a kind of woman and a kind of misdirected energy." But she found Howar's attempts to make a life and an identity for herself "genuinely, and surprisingly, moving."
In 1957, after working for the Raleigh Times, her hometown newspaper, she applied for a job with the Washington Post but was rejected. Through a friend, she found a secretarial job on Capitol Hill with the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce.
"She socialized with the Kennedys when they entered the White House, later became a volunteer on President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 campaign and ultimately went to work for his family," the Times wrote, adding that the Johnsons dismissed her after it became public that she had been involved in an extramarital affair with a White House aide. Howar turned that career setback into "Why LBJ Dropped Me," an article in Ladies' Home Journal, which led to more writing assignments and television hosting jobs.