The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (15 page)

CHRISTINE LIMERICK

Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick worked at the White House for thirty-four years, retiring in 2008. Unlike some of her colleagues’ homes, her yellow ranch house in Delaware is not a shrine to her White House years. (Instead a whole room of her house is devoted to her teddy bear collection.) The only hint of her fascinating career is a Christmas card from the Clintons hanging in the dining room. A friendly woman with close-cropped white hair, Limerick started dating her husband, Robert, when he was an engineer at the White House. She is completely unaffected by her close relationship with the most famous families in the world. And she is absolutely beloved by the staff she worked with for so many years.

Limerick “was my boss and she was a friend,” said Betty Finney, a White House maid from 1993 until 2007. “She would do anything in the world to help you if you needed help.”

She took an unlikely path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In 1972, she dropped out of a graduate program in Chinese history at the prestigious George Washington University in Washington, D.C., to become a cocktail waitress at the elegant Mayflower Hotel off of Connecticut Avenue. Her father was upset and was no happier when she joined the hotel’s housekeeping training program. “I didn’t raise my daughter to be a toilet bowl cleaner,” he told her.

That would all change.

“When I got the job at the White House I called him up and I said, ‘Your daughter is now the toilet bowl cleaner for the White House. How do you feel about that?’”

In her role as executive housekeeper, Limerick was in charge of hiring and firing maids (in consultation with the chief usher). During her time in the job, she recalls, a couple of maids left after a few weeks—either because they were too starstruck to do their job in proximity to the most powerful couple in the world, or because they lacked the necessary discretion.

“You have a balance between serving the family and knowing when you need to get out of their way,” she said. “Some of these people might not be the best bed maker in the world, they might not win an award for that, but they knew when the family needed them and when it was time to vacate the premises.”

The Clintons were her favorite family to serve. She said they were the most passionate first couple, their infamous ups and downs playing out in the private quarters. During the Clinton era, Limerick recalls, working at the White House was a roller-coaster ride. The couple sometimes got into pitched battles, shocking the staff with their vicious cursing, and sometimes they went through periods of stony silence. During happier times, though, they were liable to wander around the residence late at night when they couldn’t sleep, chatting giddily and marveling at the house.

Ivaniz Silva, who worked with Limerick at the Mayflower, was
hired by her as a White House housekeeper in 1985. Retired since 2008, she lives near Howard University with her younger sister, Sylvia, who still works as a maid at the residence. During her time at the White House, Ivaniz had to get up at 5:30
A.M.
and take two buses to get to the residence in time for her shift at seven-thirty. “If we got any snow,” she recalls, “I had to walk.” The rotation was three weeks on the morning shift, from seven-thirty to four in the afternoon, and one week on the evening shift, which ran from noon to around 8:00
P.M.

She always did what was asked of her. If a guest needed something beyond her normal duties, like hemming a dress, she would do it. She sewed the most for the Clintons and for Laura Bush.

Limerick describes a delicate dance the maids must do as they try not to disturb the first family. “We worked two steps behind them,” she recalled. “If they walk in the room, they look at you and say, ‘You can finish, you don’t have to leave.’ If they tell you to stay, you do what you need to do, but you have an ability to let what’s going on around you just go over your head. If they’re having a meeting or a conversation between the president and the first lady—maybe it’s heated, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s passionate, maybe it’s not—you just ask, ‘Can I stay, can I finish?’ You just do what you do, either you forget it or you file it away.” Even if the family wanted time alone, the residence workers would often leave one room and go to work in an adjoining chamber. “If they want privacy, they close the doors that are connected to the bathroom and we don’t leave.”

Limerick said maids follow the same code as butlers: they see but they don’t see, they hear but they don’t hear. They don’t speak to members of the first family or their guests unless spoken to, and they never approach them with personal requests.

At times, the maids have had to turn a blind eye to the youthful misbehavior of the first family’s children—including underage drinking among some of the teenagers. The residence workers
generally sympathize with kids who grow up in the White House, with so little privacy. “I was no angel when I was twenty, twenty-one,” Limerick recalled, identifying with some of the kids. “They party, and they like to have friends over, and so you see all that,” she says. And most of the workers believe it’s better for them to drink inside the gates than outside, where it could jeopardize both their physical safety and their parents’ reputations.

Susan Ford, who moved into the residence as a teenager, remembers the staff “gently nudging” her when she was behaving inappropriately. But, she says, their admonishments didn’t carry the same weight as her parents’. Some things she and her friends did, like shooting off fireworks from the White House grounds on the Fourth of July (which is illegal in Washington, D.C.), they did because they knew they could get away with it. “Who’s going to come behind the White House gate and arrest you?” Ford says that underage drinking was easy to do in the residence: the refrigerator in the Solarium was stocked with soda and beer to offer guests. “What teenager’s not going to drink beer if it’s put there in front of them?”

President Carter’s three adult sons spent plenty of time at the White House during his presidency. Florist Ronn Payne, who started at the White House during the Nixon administration and left under Clinton, said he had to do more than freshen the floral arrangements in the Carters’ sons’ rooms on the third floor. “I would regularly have to move bongs,” he said. (The unabashed pot-smoking in the president’s house was confirmed by another member of the household staff on the condition of anonymity.) If any of the Carter sons were found with the illegal drug on the street they would have been arrested, but they smoked inside the White House without fear of any repercussions.

President Carter’s mother, Lillian, and younger brother, Billy, were also fixtures at the White House. They were colorful characters: Lillian, in her eighties at the time, was known to enjoy her
bourbon (the president told the staff to keep her away from alcohol, so she would send a butler out to pick up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a liquor store on Connecticut Avenue and deliver it to her room), and Billy was involved in several scandals while his brother was president. The household staff called Carter’s brother “Billy Beer” after the beer he so enthusiastically promoted, and whenever he was drunk they made sure he “wouldn’t hit the streets,” Butler Herman Thompson said. “If they knew that you were really intoxicated and you were close to the president, like a brother or cousin, you weren’t going
anywhere
.”

One Fourth of July during President George W. Bush’s administration, after his daughters Jenna and Barbara were old enough to drink legally, their parents left them at the White House alone while they went off to Camp David.

“They allowed Jenna and Barbara to have a party on the second floor and we cleared all the furniture out of the Yellow Oval Room and they danced. They were up all night long,” Limerick said, smiling at the memory. “We shut off the Lincoln and Queens’ bedrooms—they couldn’t go there—but they could go every place else that they wanted to go. And they partied, and then the next morning we had a brunch for them. Some of them stayed up all night and some of them were a little bit hungover, but it’s better than them being on the street.”

The residence staff often come to the rescue of the first family, seeking to shelter them from public scrutiny and embarrassment. Usher Skip Allen remembers being called by the Secret Service duty desk when a sniper stationed on the roof of the White House saw something unusual. The Bush daughters were having another party in the Solarium, and it spilled outside to the walkway and onto the roof, as they often did when the weather was nice. Apparently, one of the guests had dared another to touch the flagpole. “It’s not the safest place to be even in the daylight. You can trip over numerous
hazards,” Allen said. ”There is only a narrow walkway to transit the roof safely, and all the bright lights shine directly on the flag, blinding anyone who’s not used to going up there.”

The snipers decided that the embarrassing and potentially dangerous situation would best be handled by someone on the residence staff. By the time Allen got to the roof, the inebriated partygoer was already on his way down.

Allen never said a word.

I
N A HOUSE
where even a minor bit of gossip could make national headlines, Bill and Hillary Clinton had a difficult time learning to trust the staff. The reason they changed the White House phone system was to ensure that no one could listen in on their private conversations—a move that frustrated the ushers, who had a trusted system in place for the purpose of directing calls.

When a call came in for a member of the first family, an operator would call the call box in the Usher’s Office. “If it was a call for the first lady, we’d put a little key in the first lady’s slot and it would ring a bell with her code so she could pick up any phone that was up there close by and the operator would connect her,” Skip Allen explained. “That went in during the Carter administration because there were so many people living at the White House at the time that everybody had their own specific ring. The president would have just the one ring, the first lady would have two rings, and Chelsea would have three short rings.”

Each morning, the president is awakened by a phone call from the White House operators. Most presidents get up by 5:30 or 6:00
A.M.
, and an usher is on duty as early as 5:30 in case the president needs anything.

The day after President Clinton’s inauguration, whoever woke him up got a surprise. The Clintons didn’t get back from the
inaugural balls until two o’clock in the morning. When an usher placed his wake-up call for 5:00
A.M.
, as they had done every day for his predecessor, the president thundered: “Can’t a person get some sleep around here?” (President Clinton was a famous night owl, like President Johnson before him, and his habits drove the staff crazy: some nights, the ushers weren’t dismissed to go home until two o’clock in the morning.)

The Clintons, Allen said, decided that “too many people could listen in on them” under the old phone system, so they had all the White House phones changed over to interior circuitry so that if the first lady was in the bedroom and the president was in the study she could ring him from room to room without going through the operator. “That kind of negated the security of the phone system. Then anybody could pick up upstairs in any room,” Allen said, still exasperated by the change.

The Clintons’ preoccupation with secrecy made relations with the staff “chaotic” for their entire eight years in office, Allen said. At least one residence worker, Florist Wendy Elsasser, attributes their anxiety to parental concerns: “I think protecting Chelsea may have had a lot to do with, for lack of a better term, their standoffishness with the staff.”

But it seems clear that the Clintons had little reason to worry about the residence staff leaking any secrets. Even now, years later, most staffers keep quiet when asked about what went on behind closed doors. Discretion is built into the DNA of most of them; they know that their restraint is fundamental to the protection of the presidency—and that, without it, life in the executive mansion would be impossible to endure.

CHAPTER III

Devotion

CARSON: Downton is a great house, Mr. Bates, and the Crawleys are a great family. We live by certain standards and those standards can at first seem daunting.
BATES: Of course—
CARSON: If you find yourself tongue-tied in the presence of his lordship, I can only assure you that his manners and grace will soon help you to perform your duties to the best of your ability.

—
DOWNTON ABBEY
, EPISODE 1, SEASON 1

S
undays and holidays are only words” to a White House usher, observed Irwin “Ike” Hoover, who served as chief usher from 1913 until his death in 1933.

Residence staffers have such devotion to their jobs that they sometimes refuse to go home, even when they’re told to. Lady Bird Johnson was so disturbed by her husband’s nocturnal habits that she called Chief Usher J. B. West to her dressing room one morning after the butlers had been sent home at midnight the night before.