The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (32 page)

O
N
D
ECEMBER 21
,
1970
, in a scene that could never happen in today’s age of heightened security, an unlikely guest stopped by the White House for a surprise visit. That was the day that Elvis Presley asked for an impromptu meeting with President Nixon (he had a bizarre request: he wanted to be sworn in as an undercover Federal agent), and ended up in the middle of a small office party by mistake.

Bill Cliber and a group of other staffers were singing “Happy Birthday to You” to one of the curators when he looked up to see Elvis and his bodyguards standing in the doorway of the tiny Ground Floor office.

“I just wanted to say happy birthday!” the country’s most famous entertainer said.

The room went silent, mouths agape.

“Everyone was dumbfounded,” Cliber recalled, still shaking his head in disbelief.

A minute later, a White House police officer tapped Presley on the shoulder and asked if any of his bodyguards was carrying a gun.

“Yeah,” Presley replied.

“Could you leave it with me while you go see the president?”

“Sure,” Presley said casually. “Ralph, give him your gun.” Somehow Presley snuck in a Colt .45 pistol, which he gave the baffled president as a gift.

IVANIZ SILVA

Maid Ivaniz Silva spent most of her time in the family’s inner sanctum on the second and third floors of the residence. Usually things ran like clockwork, with the maids keeping track of when the president and the first lady were off the second and third floors so that they could go in and work without disturbing them. But one evening things did not go as planned.

Usually the White House assigns around four maids to work in the residence: two in the morning and two in the evening. One day, Silva, now seventy-six, was in President Reagan’s bedroom after 5:30
P.M.
, turning down the bed and closing the curtains. But when she went into the bedroom’s sitting room, she couldn’t believe what she saw: the president, sitting there reading the newspaper, without a stitch of clothing.

“I walk in the sitting room and there he was, naked, with the papers all around him!” she said. She rushed out of the room
blushing before the president had time to say a word. He must have been as surprised as she was.

Later, she passed him in the hallway. Reagan looked at her with a twinkle. “Hey, who was that guy?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” she said, laughing shyly.

Silva is still bemused by the incident. “He knew I saw him naked, so he had to say
something
.”

Reagan may have been a bit embarrassed, but by most accounts he was fairly comfortable being naked, even when it may have unnerved the staff. About a month after Reagan’s inauguration, Usher Skip Allen had finally completed his training and was cleared to work alone. On one of his first solo shifts he received an eyes-only package that had to be brought up to Reagan immediately for his signature.

Allen went up to the second floor in search of the president. He was nowhere to be found so he tracked down Reagan’s valet to ask where the president was.

“He’s in there,” the valet said, pointing to a closed door. Allen knocked.

“Who is it?” Reagan shouted.

“It’s Skip Allen from the Usher’s Office. I have an eyes-only package for you.”

“Come on in.”

When he opened the door, Allen realized it was the president’s bathroom. Reagan was just coming out of the shower.

“All he had on was a skim of water!” Allen remembers.

“Bring it over here,” Reagan told him. The president signed his name and Allen went back downstairs.

Not long after, at around nine o’clock that same night, another eyes-only package came for the president. Allen was told that the president and first lady usually went to bed at nine o’clock, but he had no choice; he had to interrupt them.

He nervously went upstairs to track down the president again. This time he saw lights on in the Reagans’ bedroom. His hands shaking, he knocked on their door.

“Who is it?” Nancy Reagan asked.

“It’s Skip Allen from the Usher’s Office. I have a package for the president.”

“Come in.”

Just then, the president was coming out of his dressing room wearing only his underwear.

“Oh, Ronnie, you could at least put on a robe,” Nancy scolded him.

The president looked at her. “Oh, Mommy,” he said, using his pet name for her, “don’t worry about it. He’s already seen me naked once today. We’re old friends.” They all burst out laughing.

The Reagans’ son, Ron, said that his parents’ relaxed, unselfconscious nature around the staff probably made working there easier. The Reagans were used to having housekeepers around, and they never worried about what the help thought of them. “It’s hard to be in the position of a butler, or someone like that, if the person who you’re trying to serve is very self-conscious about the fact that you’re there. But my parents were not.”

Ron also acknowledges, however, that his parents’ nonchalance could be interpreted as dehumanizing the staff. “It says they don’t count, because they aren’t worth making someone feel self-conscious.” There does seem to have been a distinction between the Reagans’ cavalier attitude toward the staff and George and Barbara Bush’s equally comfortable but more respectful attitude toward them. When President Reagan stopped and chatted with workers, it was usually to talk about himself or to make a joke. The Bushes would ask workers about their families and express concern about the amount of time they spent with them at home, recognizing that they enjoyed a life beyond the White House gates—a gesture that may not have occurred to the Reagans.

Some White House stories take on a different light in retrospect. Toward the end of Reagan’s presidency, one butler recalls, he saw the president unaware of what was happening around him at a crucial time. “The movie star was the president,” he said, “and I was working down in the kitchen. The next thing I know, I looked around and smoke was coming out of the vents.” A butler working on the fireplace had forgotten to open the damper, so smoke was billowing back into the room Reagan was sitting in. “I heard the fire truck and people came rushing in and ran upstairs to the second floor.”

Not long thereafter, one of the firefighters, a woman, came back downstairs, laughing. “What’s so funny?” the butler asked her, surprised that she wasn’t more concerned.

Barely able to answer through her laughter, she told him: “Do you know the president was sitting up there as if nothing was going on? Just watching TV, reading his newspapers.”

“He didn’t even realize,” the butler recalled.

At the time, no one knew that the president may already have been suffering from the beginnings of Alzheimer’s disease. In the moment, it seemed like just another quirk of a president who was rarely flustered in the eyes of the staff.

S
OME OF THE
most enduring gossip comes from staffers who cannot get along with each other. Working at the White House can sometimes create big egos and foster big personalities. Many of the staffers who get hired, especially as chefs, are highly accomplished professionals who consider themselves the best at what they do. This kind of competitive spirit can lead to professional rivalries—the most glaring recent example being the open feud between Executive Chef Walter Scheib and Executive Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier.

Eleven years of working side by side did nothing to diminish the animosity between the two men, which they feel just as acutely
now, a decade after they both left the White House. Mesnier, now seventy years old, was hired by the Carters; Scheib, ten years his junior, was hired by the Clintons. They disliked each other so much that they often refused to discuss the dishes they were preparing. Scheib would simply hand Mesnier the weekly menus so that Mesnier could plan accompanying desserts. Scheib admits that he’s less gregarious than Mesnier and runs his kitchen more like a military commander. (“If I wanted friends,” he says, “I’d go volunteer at a youth group.”) Mesnier, who presents his creations with gusto, is an artistic Frenchman who gave all of his colleagues a cake of their choosing each Christmas, making dozens and dozens of fruit cakes, stollen, and pound cakes each year. (“The staff were not just other workers for me,” he says, “they were my family.”)

Scheib scorns Mesnier for his books and television appearances, which he sees as spotlight-hugging. “He has made himself bigger than the families, and this is unfortunate.” Mesnier claims that the comparatively trim Scheib (who looks more like a business executive than a chef) was hired because he’s attractive and articulate, a good spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s campaign to promote healthy American cuisine. “Walter and I, we did not get along because I knew he couldn’t cook,” he says dismissively.

“The ushers would joke that if Roland and I were spotted having a beer somewhere everyone should fall down on their knees and pray because the apocalypse is clearly upon us,” says Scheib.

Mesnier did show great affection for Scheib’s predecessor, French Chef Pierre Chambrin, but the Clintons fired Chambrin after he refused to exchange his heavy French menu for a healthier one featuring American cuisine. Hillary Clinton wanted to promote healthy American food, especially as she embarked on her effort to revamp health care. But Chambrin said the real reason he was let go was about appearances, not cuisine. “I am French, I am
fat, and my English is terrible. I didn’t fit the profile they wanted to show to the American people.”

For the Clintons, Chambrin told me, “food was fuel” and nothing more. “From the beginning, I knew I was doomed with the Clintons. I did what they wanted. I even tried to please them with no butter, no fat, make the menu without French words. But how do you say sauté without using the word
sauté
, for instance?”

Chambrin hated the Clintons’ casual relationship with food. Unlike the Bushes, the Clintons wanted to eat in the kitchen. “When we changed from the Bushes to the Clintons, we went from the rich to the grits.”

When Scheib was hired as Chambrin’s replacement, the cramped Ground Floor kitchen became an incredibly uncomfortable place to work. Chef John Moeller started working at the White House soon after Mesnier got his own small pastry kitchen and says without a hint of humor, “If he had stayed in that main kitchen and worked with us side by side, there might have been blood.”

CHAPTER IX

Growing Up in the White House

I ask you to consider the effect of saying good night to a boy at the door of the White House in a blaze of floodlights with a Secret Service man in attendance. There is not much you can do except shake hands, and that’s no way to get engaged.

—MARGARET TRUMAN

W
hen twelve-year-old Chelsea Clinton moved into the White House in 1993, Steve Ford sent her a letter. His advice: make friends with the Secret Service, as they might become your only link to the outside world. He says that he had it relatively easy, with so many siblings to share the experience. For Chelsea, an only child, living in the White House would be harder. And of course that ended up being the case when she had to endure the embarrassment of her father’s very public indiscretions without any siblings to help shoulder the burden. “I thought she always had a much, much tougher situation than the other families that usually had two or three siblings.” Looking back on Chelsea’s time in the White House, though, Ford says now, “I just thought she handled it wonderfully.”

When children move into the White House, the residence staff wants to protect them. They have seen what it’s like for other children growing up in the residence and they want to help them live their childhoods as normally as possible. Along with the extra responsibility of looking after children, though, the staff often relishes having a rambunctious toddler or a fun-loving high schooler around. Presidential children can bring a degree of warmth and innocence to a household, lightening the often-stressful atmosphere of the executive mansion.

Storeroom Manager Bill Hamilton watched generations of presidential offspring learn to live in the bubble of the White House. The younger the children were, he says, the easier it was for them to adjust to their claustrophobic new lives. Caroline and John-John Kennedy found it relatively easy to be themselves within the mansion’s walls; they were so young when they came to the White House that they didn’t really know anything different. For Chelsea Clinton, and for Sasha and Malia Obama, being a teenager in the White House means coping with adolescent angst while living in the spotlight. And older children, like the Fords, Luci and Lynda Johnson, and Barbara and Jenna Bush, may have had it hardest of all, in Hamilton’s view, when they realized they would have to give up a level of freedom they were used to, and would not have it back again until their fathers left office.