The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (20 page)

She was enraged. “Well you just do that, because I have always lived at home where I had to pay my own light bill. Nobody ever told me anything about turning off the lights. But if you would come home on time, you wouldn’t have to worry about me turning off the lights, because they wouldn’t be on if you’d get here on time.”

Her approach worked: “Of course after that he didn’t say any more to me.”

L
YNDON
J
OHNSON WAS
not the only White House occupant who tested the nerves of the staff. Ronn Payne remembers one day when Nancy Reagan called him into the West Sitting Hall on the second floor, where she was sitting under its large half-moon window.

“Ronn, the lights,” she motioned theatrically above her. “They’re not on.”

Payne, a florist, was far from an electrician. He looked around the room and noticed a light switch on the wall.

“I thought to myself,
There’s a light switch right here. Do I turn it on and make her look like an ass, or do I say, ‘I’ll call the electrician?’”

He decided to hit the switch, turning on every light in the room. Like a queen, the first lady looked up at him and said, “Thank you,” without a trace of embarrassment.

“She was spoiled rotten,” Payne said, making a face. “When she wanted something she wanted it last month, and if you tried to persuade her [to change] from white freesia to white snaps because white freesia wasn’t available anywhere in the world, she would say, ‘You’ll find a way.’” And they did: the florists would have flowers flown in overnight from Europe just to satisfy her.

Still, Payne, like Chef Mesnier, says he appreciated how straightforward Mrs. Reagan was about what she wanted. And if you did as she asked, she was happy.

“I remember hearing her call for her personal maid one day and it scared the dickens out of me—just her tone. I never wanted to be on the wrong side of her,” said fellow florist Wendy Elsasser.

Cletus Clark, whose hours were supposed to be from seven-thirty in the morning to four o’clock in the afternoon, remembers just how punishing his schedule was when Mrs. Reagan decided to redecorate the second and third floors.

“She didn’t ever want me to come home! We worked ten hours a day, seven days a week, and I’d see her around eight o’clock at night and she’d say, ‘Where are you going?’ I’d say, ‘I’ve got to go home.’” It got so bad, he said, that when he saw her in the West Sitting Hall he would walk down the stairs on the east side of the mansion so that she wouldn’t see him leave. “I just had to come home. After seven days a week, continuously, it wears and tears your body.”

Nancy Reagan had personal quirks that almost rivaled Lyndon Johnson’s. She could not abide long hair on women, and she made the housekeeping staff label her clothes with purchase dates and when the item was last worn.

She also had several collectibles she wanted proudly displayed at the White House, including a group of small hand-painted porcelain Limoges boxes, around twenty-five in all, to be arranged meticulously on a table. She also had a collection of porcelain eggs and a collection of plates. (“They had an incredible amount of stuff and that’s because they don’t have to clean,” Executive Housekeeper Christine Limerick said, with a wry smile.) If anyone moved any of them by even an inch Nancy Reagan would take notice. Likewise, she demanded that all her silver frames and expensive perfume bottles be arranged perfectly on the bathroom countertop—and be put back exactly in their original places after cleaning, or else.

Though she conscientiously avoids badmouthing her former bosses, Limerick makes an exception for the “very tough” Nancy Reagan. She vividly recalls the transgression that eventually led her to leave the White House for five years. “At the beginning of their administration there were several items that were broken: one by Housekeeping, one by the Secret Service, and one by the Operations Department.” Mrs. Reagan blamed Limerick. “She chewed me out. She really did.”

She went after Limerick with such venom, and for so long, that Chief Usher Rex Scouten eventually went up to the second floor to intervene. “Chris, you can go,” Scouten said, turning to speak to her and volunteering to take her place for the verbal beating. Later on he told Limerick why he’d saved her: “You’d heard enough.” The first lady then turned her wrath on Scouten, whom she adored so much that she actually named her Cavalier King Charles spaniel “Rex” after him. She even called Scouten “the second most important man in my life.” All that was not enough to spare him from the remnants of her tirade.

More than two decades later, Limerick is still shaken by the incident. She remembers exactly what was broken: “One was a Limoges plate; one was a candlestick; another time a Secret Service
guy tripped on the table and some things fell.” They were all just accidents. But that didn’t matter to the first lady. “She actually was so upset that she had me pack up a lot of her personal belongings that she had out on the mantel in the private living quarters. They stayed packed up for several months. Then finally things settled down and we unpacked them again.”

After the blowup, Limerick decided on a new protocol to keep track of any potential problems. The residence maids dusted and straightened throughout the house every day, but once a month they would do a more extensive cleaning of each room. Going forward, Limerick decided to have the first family’s bedrooms, bathrooms, sitting rooms, and offices photographed before each monthly cleaning, so that she could have a record showing that everything was put back in its place.

The hardest part for Limerick was that she and the first lady had a close working relationship. Limerick even wrapped personal presents for the first lady to give to her friends. While she was taking heat from Mrs. Reagan, though, she could not defend herself; all she could do was continue to apologize, head bowed.

“In my whole career I never had a complaint about the linen or the beds,” she said. “The ladies who worked for me, they could put me to shame. And I can make a pretty good bed.”

In 1986, after working at the White House for seven years, she left to return to the Mayflower Hotel. She then spent a couple of years in Hawaii before going back to the White House in 1991. She admits that she left, in part, because the struggle to keep up with the first lady’s demands was wearing on her. “It wasn’t because Mrs. Reagan was who or what she was. It was because I realized that I was getting close to talking back.” That would have been a cardinal sin at the White House, and she knew it.

During Limerick’s five-year hiatus, her replacement would wreak havoc at the White House. The new head of housekeeping
had problems coping with the stress of the job, and stories of her bizarre behavior eventually reached Limerick. According to Roland Mesnier, the chief housekeeper “went to the storeroom one day and requested to buy ten thousand teddy bears for the children of the world.” She actually filled out a purchase order for the stuffed animals, he says. Another time, according to florists Ronn Payne and Wendy Elsasser, she came to work with bright turquoise triangles painted on her eyelids. She was known for walking through the basement hallways spraying air freshener outside the staff office, yelling, “This place stinks!”

The Secret Service wanted the woman fired after these troubling signs, staffers said, but Limerick’s successor was allowed to stay. Limerick attributes the woman’s survival there to Barbara Bush, who was very “sympathetic” to her. Elsasser agreed; she felt that Mrs. Bush gave the troubled staffer so many chances because she wanted to see her get better. “Mrs. Bush has a heart of gold,” Chef Mesnier said. (In her interview for this book, Barbara Bush chose not to discuss Limerick’s successor, other than to confirm that she did have trouble handling the pressures of the job.)

Finally, the head housekeeper’s behavior was too much even for Mrs. Bush. One day, Skip Allen, the usher assigned to oversee the Housekeeping Department, was called upstairs urgently. Wendy Elsasser had been preparing to change the floral arrangements in the Center Hall entryway leading to Jenna and Barbara Bush’s bedrooms when the head of housekeeping grabbed a pillow (handstitched by the first lady) and threw it at her, screaming, “This is bullshit!” Jenna and Barbara stood by as the incident played out, terrified. It is unclear what set her off.

Once her grandchildren were involved, the first lady decided that Limerick’s replacement had to go. Allen helped to escort her out of the building as she screamed. “She was not going quietly,” he said.

W
HEN SHE RETURNED
to the White House, Christine Limerick found herself working under easier regimes—first for Mrs. Bush, then for Hillary Clinton. Some residence workers found Mrs. Clinton challenging to work with, but Limerick saw her as a positive presence in the residence.

“Hillary was very, very sympathetic to working women. She got along very well with the housekeepers; she communicated with all of them. She knew everybody’s strengths and weaknesses.” She knows that some of the men on staff might disagree with her assessment but chalks that up to a variety of factors. “Some of it was their fault,” she says of the men, but she also feels it reflected the first lady’s special consideration for the female staffers. “I believe in my mind that she was tougher on men than she was on women. She’d cut us a break if we did something wrong.”

Once, Limerick remembers, Hillary asked her to dye one of her turquoise suits a different color. “I’m usually pretty good with clothing,” she said with a giggle. “It was a washable fabric. It was a size ten when we started, and about a size two when I finished! And she thought it was funny.”

Bill Clinton wasn’t always as understanding. President Clinton is allergic to pine, but for Christmas the first lady wanted a real tree for a few days in the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor. The plan was to put the tree up around December 19, and take it down by December 28.

Limerick’s job was to lay out all the family’s personal decorations. Then the Flower Shop and the Electrician’s Shop would come up and put the lights up. Limerick knew how much the president liked putting up the decorations with Chelsea; it helped him feel like every other father celebrating Christmas with his family, if only for a few hours.

That year, though, the first lady wanted to get a head start. “The president has something this evening. Would you just put up almost everything except these two dozen here?” Hillary asked Limerick, pointing to a box of ornaments. The housekeeper did as she was asked. When the president came up to the second floor after the event and saw some of the decorations already hanging on the tree, he was furious.

“Who did this?” he yelled.

“Chris, the housekeeper,” a butler told him.

As the butler told Limerick later, the president mumbled something to the effect of, “Well, she better be careful about whether she’s going to have a job.”

Around midnight, one of the butlers called Limerick to tell her what had happened. She was worried but she trusted that Hillary would defend her. The next morning, a Saturday, she reported to the third floor to wrap presents for the family.

Mrs. Clinton came through the door, exasperated, “No good deed goes unpunished in this house. I’ve had a conversation with Bill, don’t worry about it.”

“Thank you,” Christine said, breathing a sigh of relief.

Another time, Limerick got a call at home from one of President Clinton’s personal valets saying that he didn’t like one of the tailors she had recommended. She had given him a list of about four. “This is at two in the morning,” Limerick marveled, “and the valet’s babbling about how the president’s mad and I better be careful.”

When she came to work the next day she called the president’s office. She was sick of hearing everything secondhand, and she was suspicious that the butlers and valets were making matters seem worse than they were, overinterpreting every little thing the president said, even embellishing things for dramatic effect.

“I understand I’m in some hot water because the president didn’t like the tailor,” she said to Clinton’s secretary, Betty Currie.

“Wait a minute, the president’s right here,” Currie said, handing the phone to the president.