The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (27 page)

Prince Philip wasn’t the only member of the royal family who surprised the White House staff with an endearing moment of informality. Once Queen Elizabeth II shocked the staff by undressing herself after a state dinner—and leaving her diamond tiara, a hefty diamond necklace, and other priceless jewels strewn about the room.

A
GENERATION YOUNGER
than Fields, Herman Thompson was destined to work at the White House. Though he worked full days as a supervisor at the Smithsonian Printing Office, his father worked at “the house” as a part-time butler (and one of the founders of Private Butlers Incorporated) and his uncle worked there as a houseman. He was friends with Maître d’ Charles Ficklin, and with Eugene Allen, who lived nearby. He even used to get his hair cut by Preston Bruce, who worked as a barber when he wasn’t escorting dignitaries to meet the president. “All of them knew me before I knew myself,” Thompson says of the close-knit group of African American butlers.

The staff watched each other’s backs, both personally and professionally, Thompson recalls. “Everybody wanted to support Charles, then it was John, then Eugene,” he said. “The main objective was to help out the maître d’, because we had black maître d’s and you wanted to make sure they looked good.” In turn, the maître d’s kept a Rolodex of reliable part-time butlers, chosen because they knew how to do everything from setting a table flawlessly to making a world-class martini.

“You didn’t have to teach them anything, you didn’t have to tell them what to do,” said Thompson, who started working at the White House in 1960 and left at the end of President George H. W. Bush’s term. Now seventy-four, Thompson still sets the family table for dinner every night for his wife of more than fifty years.

At state dinners Thompson was in charge of serving wine—with a different vintage selected to accompany each new course. He had to make sure each bottle was open and ready to pour when the food was served. “That might sound like something simple,” he said, but not when you had ten people to a table “and you had to keep that going throughout the night.” Christmas parties, he recalls, were especially difficult—in part because it fell to him to carve a huge steamship round roast.

But Thompson always considered the job a privilege, and one that could disappear in an instant. If a butler chatted too much with the guests—after all, you never knew who you were talking to—or scraped the plates too loudly in the adjoining pantry, he might never be asked back. Guests “were supposed to be given the best service that you could get in the United States,” Thompson said. “There were people from all over the world watching.”

E
VEN
M
ARY
P
RINCE
couldn’t believe how her luck had changed. Less than a year after being handed a life sentence for killing a man in the small town of Lumpkin, Georgia, the African American inmate, who was in her midtwenties, was trading her Georgia penitentiary cell for the governor’s mansion, where she would be responsible for taking care of Governor Jimmy Carter’s three-year-old daughter, Amy.

“When I first got the call to go to the governor’s mansion, I didn’t know what to expect,” Mary Prince told me. “After I went there, Amy and I—we hit it off the very first day. I mean we
really
hit it off the very first day. From that day on, it was me and Amy.”

Prince was part of a prison trustee program that assigns prisoners to work at the governor’s mansion in different capacities: some do yard work, others cook, and some even take care of the family’s children. Prince had no idea at the time that her close ties with Amy would catapult her to an even more bizarre reality: four years living and working in America’s most famous house.

Prince’s troubles had begun one night in April 1970 when her cousin got into a fight with a man and another woman outside a bar. According to Prince, she was trying to wrestle the gun away from them when it accidentally went off. But another eyewitness said that Prince grabbed the gun and deliberately killed the man in defense of her cousin. Prince stands by her innocence. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she insists. “I got caught up in a situation that I did not understand. It took six years and ten months for them to clear my name.”

At the time, Prince was ill-served by the justice system. She met her court-appointed attorney for the first time when she entered the courtroom for her trial. He advised her that if she pled guilty, he would get her off with a light sentence, but the plan didn’t work. Mary Fitzpatrick, as she was known at the time, was sentenced to life in prison. (She took back her maiden name in 1979 after officially separating from her husband.)

Yet before the year 1970 had come to an end, Prince had been selected by Rosalynn Carter to care for her daughter at the governor’s mansion. Mrs. Carter was convinced that the young woman had been unjustly convicted. “She was totally innocent,” Rosalynn Carter says. Forever loyal to their daughter’s nanny, the Carters have practically adopted her as a member of their family. “She had nothing to do with it,” Rosalynn said firmly, sounding agitated by the question decades later.

When Jimmy Carter won the presidential election in 1976, Prince’s work release was terminated and she was sent back to prison—her good luck seemingly coming to an end. But Mrs. Carter was so confident in Prince’s innocence that she wrote to the parole board and secured her a reprieve so that Amy’s beloved nanny could work for them at the White House. Even more remarkably, the president had himself designated as Prince’s parole officer. Ultimately, after a reexamination of her case, Prince was granted a full pardon.

The former first lady, who has been by her husband’s side as he’s pursued so many humanitarian projects during America’s longest post-presidency, says that Prince was convicted because of her skin color. “It was tough days, it was tough at home,” she said. When President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces, she recalls, “we came home to the desegregated South”—but racism was by no means obliterated. “You just didn’t mention the race issue. It was easy to see why Mary was picked up.” President Carter, who took heat for the decision to bring Prince to the White House, agreed with his wife’s assessment. “Hers was a story all too common among the poor and the black before some of the legal reforms were imposed on our nation,” the president wrote in one of his memoirs.

During her first six months as the country’s most famous nanny, Prince said she got about fifty letters a day, and people pretending to be long-lost relatives called to plead with her to ask the president for favors. “I was worldwide news,” she said, not sounding too upset by her stardom at the time. “Going from prison to the White House.” But the press couldn’t believe that the Carters would let a convicted murderer take care of their little girl, and not all the attention was kind: the story got so much traction that
Saturday Night Live
even devoted a skit to it, with actress Sissy Spacek playing a young Amy Carter and comedian Garrett Morris in drag playing Mary.

The media firestorm couldn’t have been easy, but Prince took
solace in her faith. “I’m a Christian and I prayed about everything,” she told me. “I asked God if I did anything wrong to please let me know and forgive me. And I guess that’s why the good Lord blessed me with the good life that I had since then. It was a real blessing for a prison inmate to go to the governor’s mansion and get close to the family.”

Even within the White House, things weren’t always easy. Prince had a hard time making friends with the residence staff, who viewed her as an outsider—and one with a controversial past. Some of them resented her because she was brought in by the president and got to live in her own apartment on the third floor. Others, evidently, envied her position of power: if Prince decided she wanted to cook a Southern-style dinner for the first family, she could send all the cooks home at a moment’s notice. She didn’t have to play by anyone’s rules as long as she kept the Carters happy. And they loved her. One evening when she was walking by the pool on the south side of the West Wing, she happened upon the first lady doing laps. “Come on in!” Mrs. Carter shouted. Prince wasn’t in a bathing suit. “Just dive in in your uniform!” the first lady said, laughing. So she kicked off her shoes and jumped into the pool in her starched white nanny uniform and showed the first lady what she had learned in her swimming class. (Amy loved to swim so she started taking lessons herself.) Prince says that evening, “just me and the first lady together out there swimming,” is her favorite memory of her time in the White House.

But rumors flew backstairs and some former staffers even believed she was guilty of murder. “That’s a good way to get rid of your husband,” one worker joked, unaware that she’d never been accused of killing her husband.

Prince paints a different picture of her time in the residence and says that the luxuries of living in the White House never fazed her. “None of that was exciting to me.” Instead she focused on her work,
and on getting her two sons settled after relocating them from Atlanta to an apartment in Suitland, Maryland, a working-class suburb of Washington. When she was done taking care of Amy at night she took a taxi to see her boys, who were looked after by her sister during the day. She’d help them with their homework, make sure their school clothes were ready, and take a taxi back to the White House late at night so that she could be up early with Amy the next morning. She never asked the Carters if her sons could move in, even though she missed her boys terribly.

“I never thought it was appropriate for me to have my family living in the White House under their roof. That was
my
job. I was able to pay for them to be close to me and have their own place.” She valued the boundary between her work life and her life at home with her boys. When she was through working, she says, “I could always go home to them.”

She never thought race was much of an issue in the White House until an usher came to her with a message that made her furious. “My kids are always dressed neatly,” she says, “because I made sure of it.” But one of her sons worked at a Georgetown tennis club, and sometimes when he visited Prince at the White House he would arrive still wearing his tennis shorts. One day, an usher approached her: “Mary, I got a phone call that your kids were coming in here with raggedy clothes on,” the usher told her. “But don’t worry about it. It’s gossip. I’ve never seen those kids come here not dressed neatly.”

To Prince, it was a dual insult: calling her African American children unkempt, and implying that she wasn’t doing her job as a parent. “I guess they thought I was dirt,” she said. She never found out who it was that lodged the mean-spirited complaint. “I think it was somebody who was just prejudiced against the idea that President Carter got me out of prison and brought me to the White House.”

But Prince rose above it all, finishing her time at the White House with dignity and maintaining her warm relationship with the family that saved her from prison. Today she lives just three blocks away from the Carters in Plains, Georgia; she still sees them almost every day when they’re in town—and takes care of their grandchildren.