The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (31 page)

As Bryant’s book revealed, President Kennedy took advantage of his wife’s long absences. She spent as much time away from the confines of the White House as possible, preferring to retreat to Glen Ora, a four-hundred-acre farm they leased in Virginia’s horse country. (They later built a house nearby that she named Wexford after the county in Ireland where the president’s ancestors came from.)

When she was away, the president liked swimming nude in the heated indoor White House pool, built in 1933 as part of President Roosevelt’s therapy regimen to treat his polio. Kennedy often rendezvoused there with his female paramours, some of whom worked as secretaries in the White House. When he noticed male residence workers peering in at the pool through the glass door, he demanded that the door be frosted. (The president would ask the cooks to prepare some food and drinks—small sausages with bacon and daiquiris—and then dismiss them for the rest of the day. The sausages were kept in a portable warmer and the daiquiri pitcher was chilled in the refrigerator so guests could help themselves. “I can take care of it,” he’d tell the kitchen staff.)

Once, a staffer was asked by an usher to fix a problem with the pool. Since that kind of work was usually saved for times when the first family wasn’t around, the residence worker assumed that no one would be there. When he opened the pool door, he was shocked to see Kennedy adviser and close friend Dave Powers sitting by the pool—naked—with two of Kennedy’s secretaries. The mortified staffer ran out and immediately assumed he would be fired. Nothing was ever said about the incident, however, and the story would remain a family secret for years.

The residence workers knew that when Jackie Kennedy was away the second floor was off limits. One night, though, it slipped
Bryant’s mind when he took the elevator to the third floor to check on an appliance. The elevator stopped at the second floor accidentally. “I could hear lovey-dovey talk,” he said. Another colleague saw a naked woman walking out of the kitchen when he went upstairs to see if the gas was turned off. “When Jackie was away, riding the elevator was hazardous duty,” Bryant recalled.

Everyone backstairs raised an eyebrow when they heard one female political staffer giving her family a tour of the second floor. When she got to the president’s bedroom, she “pretended she didn’t know where it was and had never seen it before.” In fact, she’d been there many times.

Bryant never told anyone outside of the White House—not even his wife—about Kennedy’s affairs while the president was still in office. But downstairs they couldn’t help but gossip. They needed to know how to conduct themselves, and sharing stories helped them figure out which hallways to avoid.

Johnson too generated gossip among the staff. He liked to corner the prettiest girl in the room at a party and try to kiss her on the cheek. By the end of the night he’d often have lipstick marks on his face. An embarrassed Lady Bird, who was sometimes in the same room, would plead with her husband, “You’re wanted over there, Lyndon. You’re neglecting some of your friends.”

Rumor had it that Johnson even “inherited” two female reporters from Kennedy. “He would mention one or the other to me as ‘all woman’ or ‘a lot of woman’ and even accord them the ultimate compliment he ordinarily reserved for his favorite dog, Yuki, telling me they were ‘pretty as a polecat,’” Bryant wrote. In a sign of the times, Lady Bird stoically stood by as her husband flagrantly humiliated her in public.

Ironically, Johnson was a possessive husband. One day Bryant, who was originally hired as an electrician, was told to go to Lady
Bird’s room and install an extension cord for her manicure table. The outlet was behind a dresser where the first lady happened to be sitting. Bryant had to lie on the floor almost underneath her to plug in the cord.

Johnson walked in just as he was getting up off the floor. The president’s mouth was “wide open” and he had the expression of “a jealous husband.” Bryant stammered: “Mr. President, I was just putting in an extension cord for Mrs. Johnson’s manicure table.”

Lady Bird seemed to enjoy turning the tables for once.

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guests want to bring a piece of history home with them.

Usher Skip Allen worked during state dinners, monitoring the south end of the State Dining Room to make sure no one’s wineglass was empty. He always had a service of silverware and extra napkins at the ready, so that if someone dropped a fork he could appear almost instantly with a new one. And every now and then he noticed a guest surreptitiously slipping something into a handbag.

The help never asks someone directly whether they have taken a piece of china or silverware. They usually shame them into handing it over by playing dumb and asking politely. “When you pick up the plate, you ask for the knife and the fork, and if it’s not there I say, ‘Oh, maybe you dropped it.’ We look around on the floor and they usually say, ‘Well, here it is!’”

As Jackie Kennedy’s wardrobe assistant, Anne Lincoln helped schedule hair appointments and buy clothes before she was promoted to head housekeeper and assigned to the impossible job of keeping food costs down. During the Kennedy administration, she says, stealing a piece of Camelot was common. By the end
of one luncheon, she recalls, they were missing fifteen silver teaspoons, two silver knife dishes, and four silver ashtrays. “People come here with the idea that this is their property, so they just help themselves.” She remembers one occasion when the soft-spoken first lady got aggressive. “One night she saw one of the guests slip a vermeil knife into his pocket,” she said. After dinner, but before the guests had left, she asked Maître d’ Charles Ficklin to count the vermeil silver services. When Charles reported that a knife was indeed missing, Mrs. Kennedy went right up to the stunned guest and asked for the knife back. He handed it to her without hesitation.

Jackie knew how a dinner table should be set and how a gourmet meal should taste, but she had no idea how to cook herself; Lincoln never saw her go into the kitchen to fix dinner or a late snack. President Kennedy was also hopeless in the kitchen. “The president loved soup before he went to bed and we have a can opener up there on the second floor—and I think it took him about eight months to learn how to use it,” Lincoln said. “I don’t think [the first lady] knew how to use it either.” The butlers would laugh about it with Lincoln the next morning: “Oh, the poor president had trouble with the can opener again last night.”

In mid-October 1963, a few weeks before her husband’s assassination and shortly after the loss of a son named Patrick who was born prematurely that summer, Jackie called the chief usher into her bedroom. “Oh, Mr. West,” she whispered in her childlike voice. “I’ve gotten myself into something. Can you help me get out of it?” She had invited a princess to stay overnight on the second floor, but she and the president decided they wanted some time alone instead. The devastating loss of their son had brought them closer together than ever. “Could you help us cook up something so we can get out of having her as a house guest?” she begged.

Jackie devised an elaborate ruse to get out of hosting. She told
West to make it look as though the Queens’ and Lincoln Bedrooms—the only two fit for royalty—were still being redecorated, so that her guest couldn’t possibly stay at the White House.

“Her eyes twinkled, imagining the elaborate deception,” West wrote.

West called Bonner Arrington, Reds’s brother, who worked in the Carpenter’s Shop, and gave him the game plan:

“Bring drop cloths up to the Queens’ Bedroom and Lincoln Bedroom. Roll up the rugs and cover the draperies and chandeliers, and all the furniture. Oh yes, and bring a stepladder.”

Next he called the painters and asked for six paint buckets for each room, including two (empty) buckets of off-white paint in each room. And he asked for a few dirty paintbrushes. He also brought in ashtrays full of cigarette butts so that it would look like a crew had been hard at work. In a testament to the White House residence staff’s hierarchy and mutual trust, no one involved in the intricate scheme asked questions.

When she arrived, the princess was treated to a tour of the residence by the president. JFK pointed to the paint cans and drop cloths in the Queens’ Bedroom, “This is where you would have spent the night if Jackie hadn’t been redecorating again,” he sighed dramatically.

The next morning the first lady called West, giggling, to thank him. “The president almost broke up when he saw those ashtrays.”

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just shy of their sixtieth wedding anniversary when Reds passed away in 2007. “We had a good life,” his wife, Margaret, says fondly.

The stories he told her span his thirty-three years as a White House plumber working for seven presidents; she clearly loves recounting them, as they help her to keep his memory alive. Some
of them involve presidential quirks—such as JFK’s habit of asking Reds to fill his bathtub up with water the night before so that the next morning he could save time by just topping it off with hot water. Or the time when the Kennedys’ nanny, Maud Shaw, called Reds in a panic after accidentally flushing John-John’s diaper down the toilet.

Before his death, Reds did an interview recounting the time when he almost caught the wrath of Lyndon Johnson—and his job was saved only thanks to the intervention of Johnson’s valet. One night Reds was working late on LBJ’s infamous shower pumps, fixing them with pipe dope, a material used to tighten and seal pipes. The next morning he got a call from Johnson’s valet.

“Reds, you and your men better get up there and clean the showerheads out. When the president got out of his shower this morning, he had blue pipe dope all over his back.” He added, “I haven’t said a word to him. I just took a towel and kind of patted him dry.” But the president liked to get a massage every morning, so his valet had to call his masseuse to warn him not to say anything when he saw the president’s blue-stained back. “Don’t ask him, ‘What’s all this stuff’ on his back,” the valet instructed. “Just take something, alcohol or something, and just kind of clean him up. Because if he knows that there’s pipe dope on his back, all the plumbers are going to be fired.” Reds was thankful that Johnson never found out, and he went on to work several more years at his beloved White House.

Reds told his wife that when Queen Elizabeth II came to visit, the plumbers had to build a chair that would fit over the toilet seat for her majesty—almost like a throne. “Reds just said that was really a ‘royal flush!’” She giggled.

When the queen came to visit Washington in 1976 she was already such a frequent guest that most of the residence staff were completely unfazed by her presence. Just before the white tie state dinner, the Fords, following tradition, met the queen and Prince Philip at the entrance to the Diplomatic Reception Room. They
escorted the royal couple to the elevator, on their way to spend a few minutes in the residence to chat before dinner.

As they waited for the elevator to take them upstairs, it suddenly opened to reveal the president’s twenty-four-year-old son, Jack Ford, in jeans and a T-shirt—hardly appropriate attire for a royal greeting. Without missing a beat, the queen turned to Betty Ford and said: “Don’t worry, Betty, I have one of those at home too.” She was of course, referring to her son Prince Charles.