The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (16 page)

“I am so distressed about the servants having to stay so late,” she said. “I’ve long since given up on my husband eating dinner at a decent hour. Can’t we just have Zephyr [the Johnsons’ family cook]
fix something that can be kept warm—or I’ll go in and warm it up for him—or if I’m asleep he can easily serve himself? Then we can just send the butlers home at eight o’clock every night, the way they’re supposed to.”

When West passed her question to Maître d’ Charles Ficklin, he was incensed. It was their pleasure to stay as long as the president wanted them to stay. “The president of the United States having to serve himself dinner? Never!” Ficklin said.

Charles’s brother John, also a butler, concurred. “We’ve served the presidents and first ladies every meal in formal service as long as I can remember. Even if it’s a cheese sandwich or a bowl of chili or a boiled egg. That’s a tradition.”

When West told Lady Bird that there would be a full-fledged revolt if they were sent home early, she replied: “I’ve never seen such a house. First it takes two engineers to light the fireplaces—they won’t let me do it. And now the servants don’t want to go home at night.”

Gary Walters, who was chief usher from Reagan to George W. Bush, was in charge of hiring and firing staff. He always warned them during the job interview: “This is certainly not a nine-to-five job.” He felt the toll himself; one of the reasons he retired was so that he could set his own schedule and actually go on vacation with his family.

“I had given assigned times that people were scheduled to work, but they all knew that any particular day the world situation drives what the presidency does, and that at any given time they may be called upon to stay over and work or come in early, or come in at the last minute or stay there for multiple days. It all revolved around the schedule of the presidency.”

For Walters, interruptions from his family life were routine. In 1991, he was just pulling out of the White House driveway, heading out to a University of Maryland basketball game, when he got word
that the United States, along with an international coalition, had begun bombing Iraqi forces in Kuwait. “So I drove out one gate, and before I got down Pennsylvania Avenue very far I came in the other gate.”

Painter Cletus Clark, who worked at the White House from 1969 to 2008, said that during those years he gave up his life for the job. He always had his walkie-talkie on and was regularly called in from home to work on the weekends because of the whims of the first family. “If the first lady wanted to move a picture and make a hole in the wall, they’d hunt me down to get me to come down there and fix it.”

Clark’s friend, Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy, worked closely with him. If the first lady decided she wanted to change a paint color, the two of them made the gargantuan assignment look effortless. “We had to strip all the rooms, move all the furniture. They’d paint the room on Friday and Saturday and we’d come in Sunday and put all the furniture back,” said Savoy. “When [the first family] came home on Sunday night or Monday, it would look like they never left.”

No one ever wanted to say no to the president or to the first lady. And every first lady is impatient. “Everybody’s scared of them. They won’t tell the first lady the truth,” Clark says. “She might say, ‘Can you paint the whole White House in one day?’ They’d say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ They’re not going to say no. Nobody wants to jeopardize their job by telling the truth.”

Clark said he could never take his time, even when he was working on difficult projects like finding the exact shade of yellow to freshen up the Yellow Oval Room. No record remained of what color had been used the last time it was painted, years before. Because his office was in the basement and had no natural light, he had to go back and forth outside with sample colors to see how they actually looked in the sunlight. His dedication did not go unnoticed.
Laura Bush told him he was “born to be a painter,” he recalled, his chin raised proudly.

Often world events made the president’s job all-consuming, and the residence staff needed all hands on deck. Jimmy Carter lived in an almost constant state of agitation, brought on by a nation facing double-digit inflation, endless lines at gas stations, and an energy crisis. (Rosalynn said her husband kept the residence so cold—he asked that the White House be kept at sixty-five degrees—that one of the maids took pity on her and bought her long underwear!)

But most of all it was the Iran hostage crisis that left Carter, and those who served him, exhausted. For 444 excruciating days, the residence staff had to adapt to the president’s new schedule, turned on its head because of the more than eight-hour time difference with Iran. Every day, the kitchen staff set out sandwiches and cookies late at night in the Oval Office for the president and his exhausted foreign policy staff. In the mornings Carter marched into the Oval Office by five o’clock, so staff had to have it clean with fresh floral arrangements no later than 4:45.

Mrs. Carter remembers the staff being especially attentive during the crisis. “They were concerned about us,” Rosalynn recalled gratefully. The staff also gave them the private time they desperately needed. In quiet moments, the president would sit with his wife and relax on the Truman Balcony in the afternoons. “That was good, quiet time for us.”

Thirty-five years later, Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan still feels personal, Mrs. Carter recalled. Staying in the White House for more than two months after being voted out of office was excruciating. “You lose the election on November fourth and then you’re just ready to go home.” Florist Ronn Payne remembers the toll it took on the family. “They sobbed for two weeks. I mean uncontrollably. You couldn’t go to the second floor without hearing it.”

W
ORKING IN THE
residence becomes a way of life. Storeroom Manager Bill Hamilton retired after fifty-five years on the residence staff. Not long after he left, he finally took his wife, Theresa, to London and Paris for their fifty-eighth wedding anniversary. They have seven children, thirteen grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Neither had ever been to Europe before; they could never find the time to get away.

“My wife is the only girl I ever dated in my life. We met in the fifth grade,” he said, just loudly enough so that his wife could hear him in the next room. “When I told my mother that this was the lady I was going to marry, my mother turned around and slapped me out of the chair. . . . She said I didn’t know nothing about it.”

Hamilton was hired as a houseman at the age of twenty. Like almost everyone on staff, he got the job because he knew someone who worked there. His good friend Wilson Jerman, whom he met while he was working at the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, brought him in for an interview. The two still call each other every couple of weeks to catch up, arguing playfully about who actually served longer.

Another residence worker who was all too familiar with the unusual demands of the job is the appropriately named carpenter Milton Frame, now seventy-two. Frame started his White House career in 1961 helping Traphes Bryant take care of the Kennedy family’s dogs, and spent the next thirty-six years commuting an hour and a half each way from his home in rural Virginia to the Carpenter’s Shop. When he retired in 1997 as the carpenter foreman, he was happy to stop waking up at four o’clock in the morning to get to work by six-thirty.

Milton’s father, Wilford Frame, was also a White House
carpenter. That connection helped to make the interview process more casual for Milton than for those without a family connection. He met with Chief Usher J. B. West on a Sunday morning.

“Would you like to work at the White House?” West asked him.

“Well, sir, I’m looking for a job,” Frame replied. He was working odd jobs at the time.

“If I should hire you, when would you be able to start?”

“Any time that you tell me, sir.”

Frame started the next day, and from the very beginning, he put in long days and nights. Anxious to make sure his staff could keep up with the Kennedys’ constant entertaining, West put them through unannounced training exercises. “One night we had a dry run,” Frame said, laughing improbably at the memory. “We spent all night putting up a stage in the East Room and as soon as we got it up Mr. West said, ‘Take her down.’” West stood by watching the time, clocking how long it would take to set up the stage. (About four hours to put up and an hour and a half to take down, says Frame.)

Many staffers’ days were made even longer by their commutes downtown. Most days, well before dawn, Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy could be found sitting in his car in the parking lot waiting for the Secret Service to let him in at five in the morning. His shift did not start until six-thirty, but he wanted to beat beltway traffic. He usually put in a thousand hours of overtime a year, sometimes working a solid month without a day off. He retired in 2013 and says he’s planning on doing “anything I feel like doing”—including, he added, doing “nothing in particular.”

W
HEN ASKED TO
name the sacrifices they made for the job, few people ever mention the money. The residence staff are federal employees whose pay is “administratively determined,” rather than dictated by a government service pay scale. Their pay is based on
experience level and the complexity of the job. Some workers make $30,000 a year; those at the top of the pay scale, like the chief usher, executive chef, pastry chef, executive housekeeper, and maître d’, can pull down more than $100,000.

Executive Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier turned down jobs with salaries of several hundred thousand dollars, at restaurants in Las Vegas and the Ritz in Paris, to work at the White House. “I could have made triple—quadruple—what I made at the White House!”

Mesnier is a bit of a legend on staff. He started at the White House in 1979 and left in 2006. He took his job incredibly seriously, comparing his desserts to works of art and giving them elaborate names. Who could resist “the Australian Black Pearl,” a white chocolate seashell complete with chocolate seaweed and small chocolate fish that he made for the Australian state dinner, or “Sweet Serenity-Bonsai Garden,” a sour cherry sorbet with almond mousse, tiny macaroons, and bits of nougat, accented with fresh peaches and cherries filled with kumquat puree, in honor of a state dinner for Japan? He spent long days thinking up the concoctions in the third-floor office he shared with the executive chef and the assistant chef. He occasionally stayed late enough to make use of the room next door, equipped with a bed and a sofa and set aside for overnight stays. Mesnier’s love for his job is contagious. Seven years after retiring, he told me that he still worries about the first family. Even today, when he hears about an upcoming state dinner, he starts planning elaborate desserts in his dreams.

Still, even the most passionate staff admit there is a price to be paid for life at the White House. Mesnier acknowledges that he missed more birthdays and family dinners than he cares to count. He often planned weekend dinners out with his wife and son, only to call and cancel on the ride home from work on Friday because the first family had decided to have a birthday party or a pool party on Sunday and he knew he’d need to be there. That’s how he kept
his job, he said: by knowing that the White House always came first. Residence workers who did not put their jobs above their personal lives were eventually fired, he says, as the first family could decide to fire a residence staff member at any time, without explanation.

“The family knows what’s going on, trust me,” he says. “They’re not in the back of the house checking everything, but there are people who let them know.” In particular, the social secretaries often serve as conduits between the residence staff and the first family.

Working for the Clintons took the biggest physical toll on the perfectionist chef. They hosted twenty-nine state dinners during their time in the White House, compared to six during President George W. Bush’s presidency. For their millennial New Year’s celebration alone, they invited fifteen hundred people. Mesnier didn’t leave work until seven o’clock the next morning.

“The Clintons about killed me. My legs are shot, totally shot. I didn’t sit—I could not sit. You have to move. In a sixteen-hour day I may have sat twenty minutes, that’s it. I took my meals standing up.”