The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (11 page)

W
HEN A NEW
family moves in, routines change abruptly. The Obamas have pushed their wake-up time back slightly later than their recent predecessors; they prefer to turn off their own lights at night; and they want gala apples in addition to the usual flowers in the Oval Office. The apples added a fresh task for the florists: they have to be checked every day, because the president encourages people to eat them and the supply dwindles fast. Florists are out of the Oval Office no later than 7:30
A.M.
, when President Obama is usually making his way to work.

While the Obama family’s requests don’t veer too far from those of previous first families, when their first social secretary, Desirée Rogers, arrived with them in 2009, she was committed to shaking
up tradition by bringing a new energy and new ideas to the staid executive mansion. A Harvard MBA and descendant of a Creole voodoo priestess, Rogers was the first African American social secretary, so her very presence defied tradition. In her first sixty days in the post, she coordinated more than fifty events. That’s twice as many as President George W. Bush held during the same period of his first term, and surpassed even the pace of the party-loving Clintons. She sought to change the way the White House worked, mixing and matching china from different eras at formal dinners and including Republicans in every congressional event. She also involved herself in details traditionally handled by the residence staff, deeply irritating some of them.

“She really was in her own little world when she came in the door,” Florist Bob Scanlan said. “She made it quite clear that they didn’t want what we had been doing and they were looking for a new look. I can’t tell you how many times we heard [Rogers ask for] ‘the Four Seasons look.’” He interpreted Rogers’s edict as a request for more contemporary floral arrangements, with flowers placed at an angle, as opposed to the more traditional oasis arrangement, an array of lush fresh-cut flowers stuck in foam. Scanlan said that he and his colleagues bristled when a woman was brought in for several weeks to “revamp the Flower Shop” because, he said, they were told they were stuck in the past.

Scanlan said that from the beginning many of the florists viewed Rogers as disrespectful of the mansion’s long-standing traditions and were happy to see her go fifteen months later (after a scandal involving gate-crashers who managed to infiltrate the Obamas’ first state dinner without an invitation). “When you become part of that house and you are a florist, there’s a certain element and a certain look that belongs strictly for that house. It’s not just the first family’s, it’s the public’s too. We’re doing flowers for the country.” Rogers remembers the controversy over the flowers a little differently. She
says she didn’t ask for changes immediately and stuck to tradition, at least on Inauguration Day. “There was a certain way that flowers were done in the house,” she said, adding that there was nothing new done on Inauguration Day to incorporate the first family’s style. “Remember, this is before they ever got into the house. They’re not able to say ‘we like this’ or ‘we like that,’ ‘more of this’ or ‘less of that.’ So it was pretty much set up the way it had historically been set up over the years by that florist.”

When I asked Chief Usher Admiral Rochon what it was like working with Rogers, he joked that he might need to take an Excedrin. Rogers had been a successful businesswoman, but when it came to the White House transition, she had unrealistic expectations.

“It wasn’t exacting, it was just impossible,” he said, exasperated by the memory. She wanted the walls to be painted and dry by the time the Obamas came back from the inaugural parade, Rochon recalls. “We would have to convince them that, no, you can’t have a mural on this wall, because it has to be done after President Bush leaves.”

The new family is not allowed to change the historic State and Ground floors, but they are free to make a variety of changes on the second and third floors once they actually move in. The staff even closed a wall up in Malia’s room because it led to an open walkway and the teenager wanted more privacy. Such changes, however, must wait until the limousine carries away the outgoing first family.

Executive Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier had extensive experience in the hotel industry, having worked at London’s Savoy Hotel and at the Homestead in Virginia’s Allegheny Mountains, and he earned a reputation for quickly figuring out what the president wanted. Instead of listening to Obama’s political advisers, who all claimed they knew what kind of food the president and first lady preferred, he discreetly approached family members when they visited the White House.

One aide to George W. Bush told Mesnier not to worry about making elaborate birthday cakes. Instead, he suggested, just make an angel food cake with strawberries. “I never made an angel food cake with strawberry in the hole!” said Mesnier, a boisterous, plump Frenchman with rosy cheeks. “After they see what you can do, forget about what they used to have.”

A
FTER
A
MERICAN VOTERS
elect a new president, all eyes turn to the future. For the residence workers, though, life goes on. David Hume Kennerly, President Ford’s White House photographer and a close Ford family friend, said that working at the White House is like being on a movie set: “When the movie’s over you go on to the next gig.”

For the residence staff, it’s not always easy to deal with the revolving door of families. Inauguration Day feels like starting a new job, working for the most powerful family in the world with no certainty about what they expect. Will the first lady, who has much more direct contact with the staff than the president, find fault with the food, or the flower arrangements, or the way the beds are made? “There are thousands of things like that running through your mind,” Scanlan confessed. “Is she going to call up and say, ‘I hate this’? They can do whatever they want.”

Executive Chef Walter Scheib was hired by Hillary Clinton and fired by Laura Bush. For him, the transition to Bush was painful. After serving the Clintons haute American cuisine for almost the entirety of their two terms, he didn’t know what the Bushes expected. Almost overnight, he had to go from preparing layered late-summer vegetables with lemongrass and red curry to serving up Tex-Mex Chex and BLTs. (President Clinton satisfied most of his unhealthy food cravings when he was on the road and away from the watchful eye of the first lady who even requested that calorie counts be included on family dinner menus.)

“It’s the only time I ever had a job quit me: the physical plan was the same, all the pots and pans were the same, the refrigerator was the same, all the ovens were the same, but you didn’t know your job anymore. You had to relearn your job literally in an afternoon.”

Mesnier describes saying good-bye to the departing family as “little short of funereal.”

Leaving the happy environment of the White House often isn’t any easier for the first family. President George H. W. Bush broke down crying when he saw the staff gathered before him. He was rendered speechless. “We were too choked up with emotion to say what we felt, but I think they knew the affection we had for them all,” recalled Barbara Bush. Before leaving for the Capitol, she raced through the Red and Blue Rooms to hug all the butlers privately. “From then on it was all downhill. The hard part for me was over.”

The transition back to civilian life is difficult, no matter how much presidents and first ladies say they crave a return to privacy. When the Reagans said their good-byes to the residence staff in the State Dining Room, the president joked: “You know the only problem about leaving the White House: When I will wake up tomorrow morning, how am I going to turn the electricity on? I haven’t done it in eight years. You have done it for me all these years. How will I turn the switch on? I don’t know.” (Nancy Reagan said her husband loved the luxury of the residence, referring to it as an eight-star hotel. She agreed. “Every evening, while I took a bath, one of the maids would come by and remove my clothes for laundering or dry cleaning. The bed would always be turned down. Five minutes after Ronnie came home and hung up his suit, it would disappear from the closet to be pressed, cleaned, or brushed.”)

In her memoir, Barbara Bush offers a rare glimpse of how sheltered the first family becomes after years of having cooks, maids, and butlers. The Bushes had spent decades in public service and
were famously not accustomed to buying groceries. (During his 1992 reelection campaign, Bush was ridiculed after he marveled at a supermarket scanner.) Not long after leaving office, Barbara Bush says, her husband took his first trip to Sam’s Club and “bought the world’s biggest jar of spaghetti sauce and some spaghetti” for dinner.

While he sat down to watch the evening news, the former first lady started to cook. She accidentally knocked the enormous jar of sauce off the counter, sending it crashing onto the kitchen floor. Their dinner plans ruined, they scrambled for an alternative. “That was the night George and I made an amazing discovery: You can call out for pizza!”

Sometimes the good-byes are funny. Lyndon Johnson’s youngest daughter, Luci, now sixty-seven, entered nursing school while she was living at the White House, and for months she kept the cat fetus she used for dissection in class in the third-floor Solarium’s refrigerator. She fondly referred to the fetus as “Crunchy” because it was housed in a crunchy peanut butter jar. On the day she left, one staffer, a maid named Clara to whom she had grown particularly close, thrust the jar into her hands and said, “This is the only good thing I can think about you leaving.” The two hugged and “cried our eyes out.”

“I knew it would never be the same,” Luci said. “I knew that she would be turning those energies and that deference and that grace just as quickly as I walked out the door to trying to help the Nixon girls feel just as much at home as she had made me. The allegiance that the White House domestic staff feels toward the White House and toward the president and his family who occupy it is something that makes you feel very proud to be an American.”

White House Electrician and Dog Keeper Traphes Bryant, who was skeptical of LBJ when he first moved into the residence so full of bluster, was devastated when the Johnsons moved back to Texas
in 1969. “It was over. It was really over. It was a relief. It was not a relief. It was as if someone told me I would never see a member of my family again,” he wrote in his memoir. “I had known LBJ and felt closer than a brother. And now if we met again, we would be almost like strangers. I felt lost. Then free, as I realized I wouldn’t have to take his guff anymore.”

S
OME TRANSITIONS ARE
easier than others. President George W. Bush and his family brought only one chest of drawers and some family photos, because, Laura Bush said, “part of the fun” of living at the White House is going to the warehouse in Maryland and picking out pieces from the White House collection to furnish the house. It helped that the Bushes already knew the layout of the house. “You could hardly take a breath and it was done,” Bob Scanlan said of their move-in.

Before the Bushes could start choosing furniture, however, they had to deal with a most unexpected complication: the 2000 recount, which kept the outcome of the election a mystery until December 12, more than a month after the votes were cast. Perhaps no one, aside from the candidates themselves, was watching the unfolding drama of the election quite as closely as the residence workers. Between Election Day and the day the Supreme Court upheld Bush’s victory, Walters scoured the news constantly, anxious to learn whom they would be catering to: George W. Bush or Al Gore. After the decision was handed down, Laura Bush had less than half the normal amount of time to prepare for their move.

The recount was highly contentious, with the entire national election hinging on the results in Florida, and when the verdict came down against Gore, Bill Clinton’s staff was furious. The younger Clinton aides, in particular, were vocal about their disdain for the incoming president. One staffer shouted at Chef Mesnier,
in no uncertain terms, that Bush would be a one-term president: “We’ll kick his ass out of here!” he yelled at the chef. In keeping with the residence staff’s credo to be apolitical Mesnier says, “I let him have his say and said nothing myself.” (He says that the Clintons themselves weren’t happy about their staff’s behavior, loyalty notwithstanding.)