Mr. & Mrs. Protocol

She has amber hair, aquamarine eyes, and a figure of better than semiprecious quality. He has a resolute jaw, the physique of a football hero, and a smile navigators could find their way home by. Both look too good to be true, as if they stepped off a billboard or out of a department store window; perfect, full-scale replicas of any of a number of American dreams. Instead, Ann and Lloyd Hand answered a different casting call. In December Lloyd accepted a bid from the President to succeed Angier Diddle Duke as the Chief of the U.S. State Department Office of Protocol.

The job might sound essentially frivolous, but the meeting and greeting, wining and dining, guiding and abiding of foreign chiefs of state and their ambassadors is a matter where a clumsy introduction or miscalculated place card can chill relations overnight. Accordingly, the post has traditionally gone to seasoned diplomats, and veteran socialites, such as Wiley Buchanan under Eisenhower, and "Angie" Duke, who is about to take over the U.S. embassy in Madrid.

Opera for Marriage. The Hands are a sharp contrast to the Dukes, a pair so steeped in inherited wealth and social know-how that their palms might very likely include a Reception Line, etched in somewhere between Life and Fate. Lloyd Hand is the son of a steelworker who began as a laborer for Sheffield Steel (now part of Armco Steel Corp.) in Alton, Ill., became a rolling-mill supervisor, and was sent to the company's new branch in Houston when young Lloyd was ten. Lloyd was the first member of his family to attend college. He worked his way through the University of Texas and ended up as president of the student body.

At a Freshman-orientation dance, he met Ann Donoghue, 17, daughter of a Houston lawyer. Ann took one look, dismissed her dreams of an operatic career and began to think about marriage. With respectful propriety, Lloyd twice asked Ann's father for her hand, twice was stalled. "The first time he deferred the matter to an indefinite later date. The second time, he was a little more adamant," remembers Lloyd. So Ann eloped. They were married in Newport, R.I., where Lloyd was attending the Navy's officers training school and living on seaman's pay.

A Healthy Outlook. Three and a half years later, after a stint in Korea, Lloyd returned to the University of Texas to finish his law studies. Even before he graduated, he was summoned to the office of Senator Lyndon Johnson for an interview and subsequently hired as one of LBJ's administrative assistants.

In his four years with Johnson, Lloyd became a familiar of Washington's social circuit. When Johnson moved up to the vice-presidency in 1961, Lloyd, now 36, moved out to become a vice president in a Los Angeles insurance company. He settled his family in Bel Air and prospered. Weekends there was touch football with neighbors like the Pat Boones. Ann, 31, starred with Burt Lancaster in a P.T.A. production of The Shoemaker and the Elves, picked up fashion pointers from Paramount Studio Costume Chief Edith Head.

When the Hands received news of Lloyd's new post, Ann allowed as how her wardrobe could stand some revamping. "We found," recalls Consultant Head, "that she was short a suit here, a dress there, decided where she could double up on one dress and where she couldn't." On long evening gowns, doubling up was well-nigh impossible; Ann took off for Washington with ten, two more than Mrs. Duke started her reign with.

Charm on Tap. But Robin Chandler Duke, ex-model, fashion editor, stockbroker and onetime public relations chief for Pepsi-Cola, had established a firm reputation along Embassy Row even before it became her job. It was up to Ann Hand, starting from scratch and a well-stocked closet, not only to prove that she could manage the tricks of a brand-new trade (everything from learning the names and faces of a hundred or so ambassadors by rote to making sure to seat Greeks and Turks at separate tables to remembering that the charge d'affaires of the smallest principality outranks a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense) but also to find her way in an unfamiliar milieu that demanded every ounce of charm she possessed. Luckily, Mrs. Hand has charm on tap. Her first time out (at the annual diplomatic reception given last week by the Secretary of State), she won raves. "Robin Duke was smashing," reported one observer, "but Mrs. Hand is cuddly."

At home, now a new eight-bedroom white brick house in McLean, Va., Ann Hand concentrates more on being capable. She has to, since she has five children (aged twelve to four) to tend, a full-time job even with the help of a full-time housekeeper. Additionally, there are minor matters, like languages to learn. Lloyd has some school-taught Spanish, and Ann is setting herself to learning French. "My hairdresser can help me," she says, pointing out that he is a Frenchman.

Last week, after putting most of their brood to bed, the Hands took off on a typical night out, this time to the home of Pakistani Ambassador Ghulam Ahmed. Arriving 15 minutes late, they found the room divided: Algeria, Austria and Niger to one side, wives to the other. While Lloyd Hand watched approvingly, it took his wife, gowned in black chiffon, no more than 30 seconds to integrate the all-male group, pull the party together in one wide, admiring circle around her.

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