Barbara Howar, a best-selling author, television interviewer and gleefully nonconformist fixture of the Washington social scene, died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 89.
The cause was complications of dementia, her daughter, Bader Howar, said.
By her 30s, Ms. Howar had already become known in Washington as a successful hostess. The headline on a 1966 Life magazine article about her declared, “A Swinger Frugs Gaily Into the ‘Hostess Gap.’” (The frug, pronounced froog, was a dance. The word swinger was used more broadly then.) Early newspaper articles identified her as Mrs. Edmond N. Howar, in the society-column style of the period. Her husband at the time was a prominent Washington real estate developer.
But it was “Laughing All the Way,” her irreverent 1973 memoir, that put Barbara Howar on the map.
In a decade that worshiped candor, “Laughing All the Way” spent months on The New York Times best-seller list. People magazine called its author “one of the most uninhibited, outspoken women in Washington.” (She once wore pajamas to an embassy gala.)
And the book put her on television. There she was in 1976 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.”
The next year she was interviewing the singer Anita Bryant on CBS about Ms. Bryant’s campaign against homosexuality. At one point Ms. Howar asked, “Where is your human sense of decency and fairness to people who are different from you?”
When she reviewed “Conversations With Kennedy,” a memoir by Ben Bradlee, the editor of The Washington Post and a close friend of John F. Kennedy’s, for The New York Times Book Review in 1975, she began, “If J.F.K. sometimes comes off as an S.O.B. in this book, well, he’s my kind of S.O.B.”
Nora Ephron’s book “Crazy Salad” (1975) included a chapter on Ms. Howar, adapted from an Esquire article, titled “Crazy Ladies I.” In it, Ms. Ephron described “Laughing All the Way” as “almost a case study of a kind of woman and a kind of misdirected energy.” But she found Ms. Howar’s attempts to make a life and an identity for herself “genuinely, and surprisingly, moving.”
Writing in The Times Book Review, the columnist Charlotte Curtis quoted Ms. Howar on the impact of having had her photograph appear in her local newspaper during her wartime childhood, wearing a WAC uniform and saluting a military convoy. It was probably, Ms. Howar recalled, “the beginning of a deep and abiding love for personal recognition.”
Barbara Stephanye Dearing was born on Sept. 27, 1934, in Nashville and grew up in Raleigh, N.C. She was the second of three daughters of Charles Oscar Dearing, an engineering-industry sales manager, and Mary Elizabeth (O’Connell) Dearing, known as Buffy, who could be relied on to drive from Raleigh to Washington to bail her daughter out of occasional emotional crises, Bader Howar said.
Barbara fell in love with Washington when she attended Holton-Arms, which at the time was a finishing school there (it later moved to Maryland) and which she sometimes described as a junior college. She was a debutante in North Carolina.
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 — her school roommate’s uncle, a congressman — 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. Her duties included overseeing inaugural balls, planning the wedding of Johnson’s daughter Luci Baines Johnson and (briefly) doing Lady Bird Johnson’s hair.
The Johnsons dismissed her after it became public that she had been involved in an extramarital affair with a White House aide. Ms. Howar turned that career setback into “Why LBJ Dropped Me,” a lengthy article in Ladies’ Home Journal. That led to more writing assignments and television hosting jobs — on “Panorama,” a local talk show in Washington, and “Joyce and Barbara: For Adults Only,” a syndicated interview show with Joyce Susskind.
She followed “Laughing All the Way” with a novel, “Making Ends Meet” (1976), about a divorcée who works as a Washington film critic.
Ms. Howar’s television career went on to include jobs as a panelist on “We Interrupt This Week” (which The Post called “lovably malicious”) and a correspondent on “Entertainment Tonight.” In 1977, she was Dan Rather’s co-host on “Who’s Who,” a soft-news CBS spinoff of “60 Minutes.” The show earned positive reviews — The Times called it “remarkably polished and promising” — but quickly succumbed to its sitcom competition, including “Laverne & Shirley.”
By 1986, Spy magazine, which specialized in celebrity ridicule, was calling Ms. Howar “a ludicrous woman” who “dresses like a Galleria-bound 15-year-old.” But she was still a busy TV interviewer, profiling Jane Fonda in one syndicated special in 1988. Her last screen appearances were in two 2002 documentaries, “The Trials of Henry Kissinger” and “The Last Editor” (about the newspaper editor James G. Bellows).
She married Mr. Howar, a first-generation Arab American, whom she once described as “America’s richest resident Arab,” in 1958. They had two children and divorced in 1967. He died in 2010.
Ms. Howar was later linked romantically with the author Willie Morris, whose novel “The Last of the Southern Girls” (1973) was said to have been inspired by her.
In addition to her daughter, Bader, Ms. Howar is survived by a son, Edmond; a sister, Charlsie Cantey, a sports broadcaster and thoroughbred horse racing analyst; and four grandchildren.
As her hair styles and political connections evolved over the decades, one thing seemed permanent: Ms. Howar’s immovable self-confidence. But that was an illusion, she insisted.
“I couldn’t do what I’ve done if I weren’t motivated by some sense of self-doubt,” she told People magazine in 1976. “I’ve never known anybody who doesn’t have insecurities.
“You harness them and make them work for you.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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