Forbes Magazine has "out-ed" them again, those elite members of the magazine's “400 Richest Americans List." It's fun to read, especially as several live in this area.

Consider the brothers Mitchell and Steven Rales, who started their Danaher Corporation in 1982, naming it after a Montana fishing stream. They now have $1.3 billion apiece, and they have given shareholders a 29% annual return for the last decade ... Inventor David R. Huber, ($8.2 billion) founder of Ciena in 1992, left with $200 million five years later, the Corvis Corporation ... MicroStrategy founder and CEO Michael Saylor lost more than $6 billion in one day in March when his stock plummeted after a somewhat controversial revenue re-evaluation, but he still has $1.2 billion to play with... Stephen Case, of America Online, began as a Pizza Hut manager, but now deals in another kind of dough - a fortune of $1.5 billion ... Richard Adams, of Fairfax-based Uunet Technologies and Cello Technologies has recently filed for bankruptcy protection, but his personal fortune is listed at a cool $1 billion ... Rajendra Singh, who sometimes waterskis to his Alexandria office, grew up in India without telephones, but telecom investments have brought him $1 billion ... David Oros of Owings Mills, Md. has amassed $1 billion from Aether Systems ... Richard Marriott and John Willard Marriott, Jr. have $1.2 billion and $975 million, respectively .. and from AES, the world's largest global power company, Roger Sant of Middleburg and Georgetown, and Dennis Bakke have raked in $2 billion apiece ... Two local family fortunes are the Grahams of the Washington Post at $2.7 billion, and the Baltimore Blaustein’s through Amoco at $1.2 billion ... As for the ladies in the charmed "Forbes 400 Richest" list, there are only 46 of them, and only seven are self-made. Two of the energetic seven are Oprah Winfrey, with $800 million, and Martha Stewart with a cool $1 billion, larger than the gross domestic product of Mauritania.

The evening introduced the latest pin created by jewelry designer Ann Hand , based on the Ritz Carlton logo of a crowned lion's impressive head.

Among the stellar crowd were Lisa and Christopher Jeffries . He is founder and president of Millennium Partners, the entity developing the hotel and connected luxury residences at 22nd and M Street (the most expensive real estate in the city, and more than half of the condominiums are sold already.)

Seen among the throng: J.W. Marriott Jr. , Ann's husband Lloyd Hand and daughter Susan, Marlene Malek , TV's Chris Wallace with his wife Loraine and mother Kappy Leonard, Mandy Ourisman alone (Mary was in Sydney for the Olympics,) Gerda McGrath , and Joe and Alma Gildenhorn.

And last, but certainly the most important guest in the room to Bill Tiefel: Norma Kline . Just a day or two before this was written, their engagement was announced at the home of Mel and Suellen Estrin.

The Girls goes much farther than its theme in uncovering truths concealed in a myriad of myths about the intimate relationships shared by Hollywood women such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo . Diana spent five years of exhaustive research in long-secret FBI files, film libraries, archives, inter-views and reading between the lines of hundreds of private letters.

"Everybody involved lied," she says, but some of the lies were self-explanatory; when they seemed pointless, she clug in, suspecting a hidden secret. What she found was far removed from what is still being written and believed about many of Hollywood's famous.

They lived in a gentler time journalistically. If reporters today learned Dietrich and Garbo were lovers (they were) and frequently shared their loves with each other and with members of their feminine circle, and learned of the power their group wielded in Hollywood, it would be shrieked in a moment. In that bygone era, their romances were private, though there were always those who knew-usually part of the circle-and others who surmised.

Succeeding years of supposedly credible biographies, based on false assumptions, have perpetuated the lies. It was by accident Diana discovered several of the biggest ones, some of whose consequences led up to the House unAmerican Activities Committee "witch hunts."

As one example, it is often written that Garbo and Dietrich had never met until Orson Welles introduced them several years into their careers. Both divas repeated the lie for years, and did in fact in Hollywood always keep their distance. But Diana, while routinely viewing old Garbo movies, sat bolt upright in the Library of Congress screening room when she suddenly realized that the woman into whose arms Garbo swooned in The Joyless Street, a pre-Hollywood Garbo film made in Germany, was indeed La Dietrich, yet her name was nowhere in the credits. And they both always said they had never met before Welles' introduction.

Diana called the film curator in for her opinion. They ran and reran the reel. Diana had studied too many old photos not to recognize the pre-Hollywood Dietrich, with wild black hair, black shadow-smeared eyelids, and dark cupid's bow lipstick. The clinchers were a characteristic Dietrich way of brushing back her hair, which the shadow on the screen before her was now doing, and the oddly-shaped Dietrich hands-later retouched in Hollywood stills-of very short fingers and long meaty palms. Undeniable.

But why their lie? The answer went far to explain Garbo's "I vant to be alone" legend.

Other lies led to the unearthing of an earlier Dietrich husband before the acknowledged "official husband" Rudi Sieber V. Diana found him, tucked away in the voluminous FBI dossiers on Dietrich that had not been destroyed in an earlier purge. Otto Katz, later known as Rudolph Breda, along with at least a dozen other aliases, was a super-active communist, possibly also a Nazi agent, and possibly a murderer (or agent of murder). It is almost unbelievable the marriage was kept hidden so successfully.

Katz was a man so magnetic he was feted on two continents . The idealistic anti-Nazi character of Victor Lazlo, husband of Bergman in Casablanca, was modeled on him. Through Katz, Dietrich and others secretly funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the communist cause, and it was through him she seems to have received a share of the Romanov emeralds.

Scores of celebrities are discussed in these pages. One of the most amusing is the flamboyant actress Tallulah Bankhead, daughter of the senator from Alabama, who could always persuade her pal J.Edgar Hoover if a friend needed help--and also could always be counted on to shout the last thing anyone should utter in public at the top of her voice.

The book party brought out social and literary Washington: Lucky Roosevelt; Robert Merry, who publishes the Congressional Quarterly, Vesna and Larry Leamer (he's working on a book on the Kennedy men as a follow-up to his book on the Kennedy women); Myra McPherson; Jayne Ikard; the Kennedy Center's Ann Stock; Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shaiala; Helen Thomas; Frank Mankiewicz; Charles Peters, the Washington Monthly editor; Sen. John Warner; Diana's husband, historian Richard McLellan; author Pauline Innis; Tandy Dickerson; Pamela Armstrong; and Countess Ulla Wachtmeister. It was at a Wachtmeister family castle in Sweden that Garbo stayed while she pondered the role she was about to play in Queen Christina.

Russian royalty were there in force, Prince and Princess Oblensky, and Prince and Princess Chavchavadze. Also two couples that George magazine recently photographed as prominent young social leaders in Washington, David and Janet Bruce, and Brad and Denise Alexander, along with Kevin Chaffee, who was also featured. Lynda Webster was back from trout-fishing in Montana where she and husband Bill and John and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor were guests of the Ray Brophys.

Vicki Sant, Mark Ein, George Vrandenburg & Jay Gates

The gala opening was chaired by Hillwood trustee Penne Percy Korth aided by Mrs. Post's granddaughter, Ellen MacNeille Charles, who is president of the Hillwood board of trustees. Mrs. Charles and approximately 30 other family members succeeded in creating the atmosphere of bygone times, even to the array of glassware and stunning appointments of the long banquet table set befitting an empress. This sight moved one guest to remark to Mrs. Post's daughter, actress Dina Merrill, that her mother had not only donated a magnificent banquet cloth to the Women's National Democratic Club, but that she had gone into the kitchen to admonish the housekeeper in detail on the best way to care for it.

“Mother," said Dina Merrill of her multi-millionairess mom, "would have made a marvelous housekeeper."

Cooperation Foundation inaugurated the presentation of Alexander Bourganov's sculpture of Alexander Pushkin, the Shakespeare of Russia, as a gift from the city and people of Moscow to the citizens of Washington.

That evening the Ambassador and Mrs. Ushakov held a reception at the Russian Embassy residence honoring the inauguration and the official visit of the Moscow Government delegation.