Mills! Where are you?” Mills strode onto the stage. ![]() Then she turned to the wings and called, “Mr. “I’d like you to meet somebody,” Foxe told the audience at the end of her act. ![]() He made a public appearance at a Boston burlesque theater where Foxe was performing. Mills won, but not long after, he did something that is very difficult to understand. The vote for his congressional seat was a month later. It wouldn’t have been the first or last time that monkey-business had torpedoed the career of a presidential hopeful. Mills’s own explanation: “I drank booze, and I mixed the drinks with some highly addictive drugs.” Maybe it was some combination of all of the above, along with the fact that sometimes, people do logic-defying, out-of-character, potentially life-ruining things because they want to have sex. Maybe he was tired of his chairmanship, some suggested. Perhaps the drugs had muddled his thinking. Mills was taking medication for back pain after a surgery the year before. Johnson arrived ten minutes late to the airport to discuss a budget issue related to the Vietnam War, Mills had ordered his pilot to take off and was already in the air.Īfter the Tidal Basin incident, the public grasped for explanations. In a possibly apocryphal tale, when then-president Lyndon B. Mills was unerringly punctual and expected the same reliability from others. His interests included baseball, “light reading,” and “light music.” When he was in the newspapers, it was only to discuss tax law, foreign trade tariffs, military spending, and social security. He refused to invest in the stock market, out of concern that it might create conflicts of interest, and was rumored to only invest in diamonds. A fiscal conservative, Mills is often blamed for capping the expansion of Medicare. He had been living in the same modest apartment near the National Zoo for the last quarter century with Polly. If he burned the midnight oil, it was not because he was cavorting with strippers - but because he was known to spend his evenings studying the ins and outs of the tax code. 905), Mills, who was once described as looking like “Lyndon Johnson in miniature,” was known for his excessive caution, fastidiousness about legislative details, and his moderation. ![]() As for the swerving, speeding vehicle, Mills explained that the friend who was driving “was unfamiliar with my car and among other things in the glare of the lighted streets neglected to turn on the headlamps.” He apologized to his constituents and his wife of 40 years, his childhood sweetheart Polly, whom Rolling Stone would later describe as “a pleasant gray-haired woman.” Of his wife’s absence from the scene, Mills said she was “blaming herself for not accompanying us that night even with her broken foot.” Mills then thanked the park police “for the courtesies extended to me and my friends.”įor many, the bawdy scene didn’t mesh with what they knew of the distinguished congressman. Battistella and her husband (who was not present) were “close friends,” he said, and he was merely trying to give her a ride home after she became too intoxicated. (Full disclosure: The author’s father was an intern for Wilbur Mills in the summer of 1976.)Īt first, Mills’s aides denied that Mills was present at the scene, then he attributed these denials to miscommunication. No charges were filed and the park police climbed into Mills’s limousine and drove the group home. The congressman was found inside the car with three other friends, and with inexplicable scratches all over his face. Park police fished her out and handcuffed her when she tried to do it again. ![]() “My long, expensive evening dress lapped around my legs, but I felt nothing,” she would later write. Annabel Battistella a.k.a Fanne Foxe, a.k.a the Argentine Firecracker, a 38-year-old exotic dancer, bolted from the car, ran down the road yelling in alternating English and Spanish, and leapt into the Tidal Basin in front of the Jefferson Memorial. on October 9, the congressman’s swerving limousine was pulled over by park police near Washington’s Downtown Mall. On a mild fall night, his career ended with a literal splash. Mills, who had been a congressman for 36 years, was being discussed as both a presidential candidate and a potential Supreme Court justice. “I never vote against God, motherhood or Wilbur Mills,” a House colleague once told a reporter. As chairman of the Ways and Means committee, Mills held “near-absolute sway over any legislation with fiscal consequences,” which is to say a lot of legislation. In 1974, Congressman Wilbur Mills, an Arkansas Democrat, was arguably the most powerful politician in the country. Congressman Wilbur Mills and exotic dancer Fanne Foxe speak with reporters outside Foxe’s dressing room in 1974.
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