"Quiet back there," bellowed the man at the noisy group in the residence of the Irish Ambassador, Sean O hUiginn, who was trying to be heard over the din.
The Ambassador was about to praise Frank McCourt to the glittering crowd gathered for a reception before the first Washington showing of the film version of Angela's Ashes, the now legendary best-seller about a poverty-stricken boyhood in Limerick.
The man appealing for silence was Frank McCourt himself. "That's his teacher's voice," one of the guests said knowingly. "He used to be a teacher, you know."
Not making noise but listening politely to the Ambassador were the stars of the film which will be released in US cities next week: Emily Watson who plays the long-suffering Angela; Robert Carlyle who plays the feckless father and Joe Breen who is the "young Frank". The nine-year-old Mr Breen, from a farm outside Ferns, who was chaperoned by his agent, graciously gave this correspondent his autograph.
Director Alan Parker picked young Breen for the part after three auditions. His watchful face is now on the cover of the latest edition of the book, which is on the New York Times best-seller lists for three years and has sold over four million copies in 20 languages.
But Mr O hUiginn recalled earlier days with McCourt in New York when he was a poorly paid teacher and a struggling writer. The Ambassador, who was then Ireland's consul-general, used to meet McCourt and other literary figures in what was called the First Friday Club but had nothing to do with penitential devotions.
Having enjoyed the McCourt wit at these sessions, the Ambassador confessed that he had some fears when opening Angela's Ashes because often the good talkers don "boots of lead" when they try to write. But the McCourt prose was "pitch perfect" in telling a story which some have found too harsh but which the Ambassador hailed as showing the "resilience of the human spirit" and "triumph over adversity".
Some copies of the sequel, called 'Tis, were lying around but the Ambassador diplomatically made no reference to it. Many of the critics have hammered it and the review in The Irish Times had the cruel headline "Tisn't". Was he hurt by the review, I asked McCourt. "Another Oxford academic," he snorted, referring to the reviewer, Terry Eagleton.
The whole McCourt canon comprising Frank's two books and brother Malachy's A Monk Swimming gets rough handling in a four-page review from a second Oxford academic and Yeats biographer, Prof Roy Foster, in the prestigious New Republic magazine. Foster writes that Angela's Ashes "is not and never will be (pace the New York Times) a `classic memoir', because its author lacks an internal editor, a sense of developing structure.
"The language is monotonous and the incidents are repetitive. The characterisations are perfunctory; people are identified by formulaic straplines which are trundled out again and again each time they appear." Foster also finds imitative echoes of Joyce, O'Casey, Mac Liammoir, Dostoevsky and Dickens.
As for 'Tis, it is "not very interesting" and "the characterisations come straight from central casting". Malachy's book is described by the Oxford academic as "an embarrassment".
Frank can laugh or cry all the way to the bank at these reviews. As a multi-millionaire he was probably richer than the other guests at the embassy with the exception of Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom Entertainment Group, who last September negotiated a $70 billion merger with CBS. The media conglomerate also includes Paramount, which made Frank's film, and Simon and Schuster, which publishes his books.
Mr Redstone, who thanked everybody for coming, has a background a bit like that of Frank. He grew up in a Boston tenement but his father invented the drive-in theatre and Sumner got to Harvard before he began buying cinemas.
Everyone wanted to know if Frank liked the movie Alan Parker has made out of his book. Yes, he thinks it is great and that Emily Watson has done a splendid job as Angela. She has told an interviewer that when she met Frank in Dublin during filming she asked him if he wanted to tell her anything about his mother and he said no. "Because I am never going to be anything like his mother. There's no way of knowing what she was like. I can only re-invent what was in the book," she said.
The part of the film that moved Frank the most, Ms Watson said, was the scene when he strikes his mother across the face, calling her a slut, as she goes up the stairs to sleep with the appalling Laman Griffin, their distant relative who has given the McCourts refuge. Frank said that that scene "floored him".
Alan Parker, who stayed modestly in the background, plays the part of a doctor in the film. As in other of his films where he plays vignette parts, the make-up people give him a Hitler moustache. He says that is their way of getting revenge.
Then it was time for the stars to be driven away to the screening on Wisconsin Avenue in their stretch limos and for the rest of us to be bussed. For a few hours, the residence on S Street had seemed like a Hollywood party.
Incidentally, the attendance included Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America and one-time political aide to President Lyndon Johnson. According to the New Yorker, President Clinton, who loves Hollywood, is interested in Mr Valenti's job when he leaves the White House. Mr Valenti says the movie business is a bit like politics. And in addition one is "around beautiful women every day". Hmm.