The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (19 page)

Johnson loved toilet humor and aroused roars of laughter once he got going. One day he broke a toilet seat and “all hell broke loose,” according to Electrician and Dog Keeper Traphes Bryant. An extra-large wooden seat was ordered as quickly as possible. Far from being embarrassed, Johnson bragged to his male friends about his new custom seat and styled himself somewhat of an expert on the subject. “He knew the good points and the bad points of all the kinds he could have had: plastic, nonplastic, bamboo, flowered, Grecian, or Early American.”

Johnson would tell his friends: “Now don’t anyone dare say it’s to fit the Number One ass of the nation.”

Johnson, who started his career as a high school teacher, roamed the halls of the White House, giving everyone—including his family—letter grades on their performance. He stuck his head into the different shops in the basement, shouting a grade at each worker.

Once he stuck his head in the Electrician’s Shop and told Bill Cliber: “Today you got an F.” Cliber doesn’t remember why.

Then again, said Butler Herman Thompson, “Sometimes we would have a dinner and after the dinner was all over and the guests were gone he would come in and he would say, ‘Hey fellas. You all did a good job tonight.’”

Plumbing Foreman Reds Arrington, who got his nickname because of his mane of bright red hair, may have found Johnson amusing at first, but he was soon made completely miserable by the president’s eccentric demands. Arrington, who started in the White
House in 1946 and retired in 1979, passed away in 2007, but his wife, Margaret, wrote down many of his stories. She remembers how Johnson’s erratic schedule affected their lives and the lives of their three daughters. “We were at a restaurant in Annapolis and they came through saying ‘White House calling Mr. Arrington, White House calling Mr. Arrington.’ I just thought that was so funny. It was President Johnson wanting something done with his commode.”

Johnson tortured Reds with his obsession with the water pressure and temperature of his shower. No matter what the staff did, the water never came hard enough or hot enough for Johnson. When the president was in a mood to dole out letter grades, the shower got an F every time.

Johnson’s shower fixation was made clear from the start to the still-grieving staff. On December 9, 1963, just as Chief Usher J. B. West was returning from his first day off since President Kennedy’s assassination, he was summoned to meet with President Johnson at the Ground Floor elevator landing immediately. It was two days after the Johnsons had moved into the White House, and the president had a pressing matter to discuss.

“Mr. West, if you can’t get that shower of mine fixed, I’m going to have to move back to the Elms,” he said sternly and walked away. The Elms was the Johnsons’ Washington, D.C., mansion and it was equipped with a shower like nothing the staff had ever seen: water charging out of multiple nozzles in every direction with needlelike intensity and a hugely powerful force. One nozzle was pointed directly at the president’s penis, which he nicknamed “Jumbo.” Another shot right up his rear. It elicits chuckles now, but Johnson’s shower fixation came to define his relationship with some of the residence staff.

Johnson wanted the water pressure at the White House to be just like his shower at home—the equivalent of a fire hose—and he
wanted a simple switch to change the temperature from hot to cold immediately. Never warm.

A few minutes after West got his dressing-down from the president, Lady Bird Johnson asked to speak with him in the small Queens’ Sitting Room on the second floor.

“I guess you’ve been told about the shower,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Anything that’s done here, or needs to be done, remember this: my husband comes first, the girls second, and I will be satisfied with what’s left.” (She told Executive Chef Henry Haller the same thing: “Your main role will be to make the president happy.”)

The Kennedys never complained about the shower, so the engineers were at a loss. A team was sent to the Elms to study the plumbing, and Reds was even sent to the Johnsons’ ranch near Stonewall, Texas (nicknamed the “Texas White House”), to increase the water pressure and heat there to nearly scalding temperatures. When he found out that a new shower for the president would require laying new pipe and putting in a new pump, Johnson demanded that the military pay for it. The project, which cost tens of thousands of dollars, was paid for with classified funds that were supposed to be earmarked for security. “We ended up with four pumps, and then we had to increase the size of our water lines because the other parts of the house were being sucked dry,” Arrington told
Life
magazine.

Margaret Arrington remembered Johnson calling Reds himself while he was sitting in the Plumber’s Shop, located underground between the White House and the West Wing. “If I can move ten thousand troops in a day, you can certainly fix the bathroom any way I want it!” Johnson howled, his voice echoing down the halls of the White House.

Reds spent more than five years consumed by that shower; at one point he was even hospitalized for several days because of a nervous breakdown. Johnson was so obsessed that he brought his own
special shower nozzle when he traveled, along with dozens of cases of Cutty Sark whiskey. Johnson also wanted his bathroom to be incredibly bright, and asked for mirrors to be installed on the ceiling. Reds and his team installed so many lights that they had to put in fans to keep the heat down. The shower’s extreme temperatures regularly set off the fire alarm.

One day, Margaret said, when Reds looked in Johnson’s shaving mirror, he screamed. “He could see all the veins on his face. He said it was scary!”

More and more people, including members of the Park Service, were summoned to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in an effort to fix the shower crisis. Usher Rex Scouten even jumped in the shower in his bathing suit to test it out. “It threw him up against the wall, it was so strong,” Margaret said. “Reds said he came out as red as a lobster.”

Five replacement showers, including one custom-built by the same manufacturer that designed the shower at the Elms, were installed, but they wouldn’t do. The plumbers even had a special water tank installed with its own pump to up the pressure, and added six different nozzles located at different heights so that the spray would hit every part of the body. The pumps sprayed hundreds of gallons of water per minute—
more
than a fire hose. Still not good enough.

Cliber, who started at the White House when he was just twenty years old and stayed on for forty-one years, said Johnson once asked him to come into his bathroom and watch him test out the shower.

“Are you ready for a man’s test?” the president said, standing stark naked in front of the electrician, one of the dozens of staff members brought in to address the domestic crisis.

“I’m going to throw it to you this time,” Cliber said.

“Okay, give it your best shot,” Johnson said as he jumped in.

When Cliber turned the shower handle on, Johnson yelped in pain, the pressure was so intense. “Whoa! What are you doing to
me?” But a minute later he was screaming in ecstasy. “Wait, this feels good! Whoa!” It blasted him against the wall and he came out beet red.

And yet it still wasn’t quite right.

The last day Arrington saw Johnson in the White House, the president was sitting on the toilet. Reds had to work on something in the president’s bathroom and was standing outside, waiting for the president to come out.

“Come on in,” Johnson bellowed.

Reds walked in sheepishly.

“I just want to tell you that the shower is my delight, and I appreciate everything you did.”

For Reds, that one small sign of gratitude made those stressful years less painful to remember. Margaret said that Lady Bird invited them to their Texas ranch for “one more hoorah!” after Johnson died. “It was just wonderful. We had a picnic supper and I was with movie stars and generals and, gosh, I was just eating it up!”

Johnson’s older daughter, Lynda, would later thank Reds and his wife in person: “When Daddy was happy we were all happy, and we thank Mr. Arrington for that!”

When I interviewed her younger sister, Luci, she was more reflective about her father’s shower obsession. “A shower that had volume and force was one of life’s few comforts,” she told me. She is keenly aware of her father’s legacy and how it has been marred by Vietnam. “I’m sure he probably expressed very specific guidelines and expectations and probably expressed them with a firm hand. But it’s not much to ask for when you are the leader of the free world, getting that small little bit of solace and creature comfort.”

And yet, as soon as Lyndon Johnson was gone from the White House, his shower was too. Richard Nixon took one look at the elaborate setup and said: “Get rid of this stuff.”

D
ESPITE HIS EXTRAORDINARY
demands, LBJ had the complete loyalty of his staffers. Social Secretary Bess Abell, who affectionately called Johnson “the big boss,” came in for some intense presidential pressure. After Abell gave birth to her first son, Johnson called her at the hospital and asked, “What did you name that boy?” When she told him “Daniel,” he replied: “Oh too bad, if you’d named him Lyndon, I’d have given him a heifer calf.”

She was sure to name her second son “Lyndon” after that. “He wanted everyone to name their baby after him,” she said.

Lynda Bird Johnson Robb said that her father “considered it a supreme compliment” when people named their children after him. And he was never afraid to push. One of Lynda’s friends told her about a conversation she had with her father before her son was born. “You’re going to name the baby Lyndon, aren’t you?” Johnson asked her, his imposing six-foot-three-inch frame looming over her.

“No, we have this name we picked out,” she stammered.

When she saw the disappointment on his face she added: “But you know we love
all
of the Johnsons, and so we’re going to give our boy ‘Johnson’ as a middle name.”

Lynda laughed at the memory. “I don’t know if that was really for us or just to make Daddy a little happier!”

When he first took office, Johnson ordered a budget reduction in every executive department. Convinced that an enormous amount of electricity was being wasted at the White House, he terrorized anyone who forgot to turn off the light when they left a room. The Eisenhowers had established a tradition that all the lights in the State rooms should be kept on until midnight, but Johnson demanded an end to that. He personally wandered the halls looking for any transgressions and if he saw a light on somewhere that he didn’t want to investigate himself, he called the Usher’s Office and
asked them to find out who was there. If the room was empty, he became furious.

Carpenter Isaac Avery was working late one night in the Carpenter’s Shop when all of a sudden the room went pitch-black. “Goddammit, who turned off the light?” Avery yelled. There was a pause.

“I
did,” a deep voice growled from the hallway.

Avery turned on the light switch and walked out into the hall to investigate. He saw the president standing there flanked by two Secret Service agents.

“I didn’t realize you fellows worked so late,” Johnson said, mellowing as he realized his mistake.

“I was finishing the frames for all those pictures you sent over,” Avery told him, stunned.

Another unlucky staffer was working in the Carpenter’s Shop, putting pull chains on some fluorescent lights, when Johnson caught him working with the lights on—in the daylight.

“He just went after him profusely,” Bill Cliber recalled, shivering at the memory.

Everywhere the residence staff went, Cliber said, they learned to carry flashlights for fear of getting caught in utter darkness.

Finally, one of Johnson’s requests seemed to go too far. The stairs were all lighted for safety, but the president was convinced this was burning too much energy.

“You have to turn off all the step lights,” Johnson told Cliber.

“Mr. President, you can’t turn the step lights out. This is a big building. Everybody thinks it’s only three stories high—it’s eight floors inside this White House [including two small mezzanine levels]. And these are all marble steps and boy, you slip on those and you hurt yourself.”

“Well, are you sure?” Johnson wanted so badly to keep those lights off.

“Yes, sir, I’m sure.”

“Okay, keep the lights on the steps,” Johnson replied, in a rare concession. Still, every once in a while he would stop into Cliber’s basement office and plead: “You still got those step lights on?”

The only person who really stood up to Johnson (even Doorman Preston Bruce had to be careful how he talked to his boss) was Zephyr Wright, the Johnsons’ family cook, whom they’d brought with them from Texas. She first realized that she had to “talk up to him” well before he became president.

One night Johnson came home at about eleven-thirty, and asked for dinner. Even for Johnson this was unusually late, so late that Wright had gone downstairs to lie on her bed and rest. When he called her to serve him, she forgot to turn off the lights before she went back upstairs. When he saw that the downstairs light was still on, he threatened to take the cost of the electricity out of her pay.