The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (35 page)

Mary Prince insists that Amy was not tainted by her celebrity—contrary to some who said she insulted foreign guests by reading a book during a state dinner. “She was not a spoiled brat. She really never tried to get her way. She was just a young kid having fun.”

Chef Mesnier describes Amy as a whimsical little girl who was not overawed by the majesty of the White House. After school, she sometimes ran down to the kitchen to ask him to send up the ingredients for her favorite sugar cookies, which she liked to make herself in the small kitchen on the second floor and bring to school the next day. Often, though, after putting them in the oven, she would start roller-skating or playing in her treehouse and completely forget about them; when the smell of burned cookies wafted through the hallway, at first a slew of Secret Service agents would run to the
Pastry Kitchen thinking that that was the origin of the problem. Mesnier would look at the harried agents and just point upstairs. They would then go racing up to the second floor to open the windows and rescue the ruined cookies. The next morning Amy would usually come to the kitchen and tell the chef that she was supposed to take cookies to school and she didn’t know what to do. When Mesnier asked her what happened to the ingredients he sent her the day before she would reply, blushing, “There was a small accident.” (He got so used to this routine that, when Amy wandered into the kitchen the next morning to ask for some cookies to take to school, he would have a backup batch ready to go.)

The Carter children lived a charmed life even before coming to the White House—their father was a successful farmer who had served two terms as a Georgia state senator and one as Georgia’s governor. Sometimes they seemed totally disconnected from the real world, especially from the people who served them every day.

One butler remembers chatting with one of Carter’s sons, who was in his twenties at the time. He was sitting in the family kitchen reading an article in the newspaper about rising rent prices in Washington. He looked up from the paper at the butler and said: “I’m glad that I’m allowed to stay here in the White House.”

The butler turned to him and said: “Yes. That’s one reason I’m in here, working two jobs because the rent costs so much. I’m struggling.” Carter’s son was shocked. He couldn’t believe this dignified man had to work two jobs just to pay the rent.

“You come outside and live with me and you’ll see,” the butler told him.

T
HE
C
LINTONS FIERCELY
guarded their daughter Chelsea’s privacy, and asked the media to limit their coverage of her to public events
only. For the most part journalists complied. But the media had other ways of plunging her name into the news. In a 1992 “Wayne’s World” skit on
Saturday Night Live
, Mike Myers, playing the goofy Wayne, jibed that adolescence “has been thus far unkind” to Chelsea, adding “Chelsea Clinton—not a babe.” The skit enraged the Clintons, and the remarks were edited out of rebroadcasts. Meyers even wrote a letter of apology to the Clintons.

Like the Obamas and the Kennedys, the Clintons felt it was important not to let their children become spoiled in the White House. In fact, Chelsea often told the chef not to worry about cooking for her. She’d be making her own dinner: Kraft macaroni and cheese.

By and large, Chelsea was adored by the residence staff. Maid Betty Finney said she was like their own child—they felt protective of her. “Teenagers, you’re thinking rudeness. That was never, ever Chelsea. I had never seen her be rude in the entire stint I had there,” Finney said. “She wrote me a note thanking me for my services. That’s just the way she was.”

Still, Chelsea was a “normal” teenager in some ways. For starters, she hardly ever made her bed. And like all teenagers, she liked hanging out with her friends.

Well before
Downton Abbey
showed Lady Sybil getting cooking lessons from downstairs cook Mrs. Patmore, Chelsea Clinton and some friends from her posh private school, Sidwell Friends, did a sort of informal internship with the residence staff. (Years before, Jackie had taken five-year-old Caroline to the White House kitchen to bake tiny pink cupcakes from a toy baking set Caroline had gotten for her birthday.) Chelsea and her friends spent part of the day in each department, learning from the best how to cook, clean, and arrange flowers. She proudly showed her parents her flower arrangement—which was displayed in the Red Room—and made them try some of the meals she learned to prepare.

“Mrs. Clinton had decided they wanted Chelsea to be a little bit more self-sufficient and didn’t necessarily want her going to the dining hall and out to restaurants each night,” Executive Chef Walter Scheib recalls. “So I got a call from Mrs. Clinton asking if I would teach Chelsea how to cook.” There was another factor at play: Chelsea was a vegetarian, and her mother wanted to make sure she would be able to prepare healthy food for herself when she was in college. The summer of her senior year in high school, before she went off to Stanford University, Chelsea wandered down to the kitchen to learn the beginning and intermediate levels of vegetarian cooking.

“She was an extremely quick study, and as everyone knows now she is very, very bright,” Scheib said. Even at seventeen, Scheib said, she was acutely aware of the staff’s sacrifice. “She’s a very intense person who didn’t take this opportunity lightly. She respected us tremendously in terms of us offering her our time.”

At the end of their lessons, he gave her a chef’s coat inscribed:
CHELSEA CLINTON, FIRST DAUGHTER.
The White House calligraphers even made her a diploma: “Walter Scheib’s White House Cooking School.” Later, Chelsea sent Scheib a note: “Thank you very much for letting me take your time. I hope I wasn’t too much trouble.”

“I think back to what I would have been like had I been the first son at seventeen,” Scheib says now. “I was a bit of a jerk; she was so modest and understated and so thankful for all of the things we did. I remember Chelsea would call down for breakfast and say, ‘If it’s not too much trouble . . .’ And I would say, ‘Chelsea, it’s not too much trouble. It’s my job.’”

The butlers later told Scheib they’d overheard Chelsea talking with her mother about what she’d learned from him that day in the kitchen. “Mrs. Clinton and Chelsea were very, very close. The first lady would change her schedule if Chelsea was available for a meal.”
The residence staff often saw this softer side of Hillary, counter to her hard-charging public persona. “In private she was a doting and caring and truly loving mother. She thought Chelsea was the be-all and end-all.”

For Scheib, it was that kind of access to the first families that made his grueling job special. “This is what working at the White House is. Some will talk about, ‘I made this cake,’ or ‘I made that soup,’ or ‘I arranged these flowers.’ That’s not what the job is. The real beauty of the job is getting to see these relationships. It was never about us. It’s not about the pastry chef, it’s not about the chef, it’s not about the florist, it’s not about the groundskeeper. It’s about families.”

N
O MATTER HOW
friendly the staff become with the children of the residence, the line between the help and the family was always clear. “For all the fancy titles, we’re domestic staff, we need to remember our place,” said Scheib. During the Bush years, he said, “Our only job was to be sure that Jenna and Barbara had exactly what they wanted for lunch or that the president’s meal coming back from church on Sunday was exactly as he wanted it.”

They always wanted to impress the first family. For Hillary Clinton’s fiftieth birthday, Mesnier created an over-the-top cake made of blown sugar balloons—with a hand-painted reproduction of her best-selling book
It Takes a Village
.

For Chelsea’s sixteenth birthday, he struggled to think of something that would wow her and her parents. He did not know what to make for her and emphatically refused, in his heavy French accent, to “make a cake with flowers on it for a sixteen-year-old. I want something with meaning!”

Two days before her birthday, Mesnier still hadn’t settled on the right idea for her cake. Then, on his commute to work, he heard
on a radio show that Chelsea wanted a car and a driver’s license for her birthday. That settled it. He made a handmade Washington, D.C., driver’s license and a car made out of sugar. But the Clintons were celebrating her birthday at Camp David in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Park about sixty miles north of the White House, so the cake had to be sent all the way out there—and Mesnier was so worried about the trip that he loaded the cake into the van himself and gave the driver strict instructions on how to handle it. “If you don’t listen,” he said, “you’re going to have a problem.” Then he made the driver promise to take a photo of the cake once it arrived.

I
T MAY BE
hard for some presidential children to adjust to life in the White House, but the residence staff is always happy to see them. They bring a levity and joyousness that is otherwise absent in the staid and elegant rooms. The second and third floors are cheerier when kids are running up and down the hallways. “Everybody was old when I got there,” says Bill Hamilton, who started during the Eisenhower administration. When the Kennedy family arrived, however, the difference was like night and day. He remembers seeing Caroline and John-John playing with their menagerie of animals, including a pony named Macaroni that Caroline would ride on the South Lawn. “It was just so nice to see. You didn’t think this would ever happen in the White House.”

CHAPTER X

Heartbreak and Hope

I still can’t talk about it.

—WENDY ELSASSER, FLORIST, 1985–2007, ON WORKING IN THE WHITE HOUSE ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

P
ierce, hurry up and get to the office. The boss has been shot,” a panicked Secret Service officer barked at Nelson Pierce as he walked through the White House gates to start his shift on the afternoon of November 22, 1963.

More than five decades later, Pierce remembered every minute of that day in 1963. Once he got through the gate he raced to the residence and rushed to the Usher’s Office, where a group of horrified staffers were gathered around the TV.

Unlike the rest of the country, Pierce had no time to mourn. He had a job to do. Like most of the residence staff, he showed very little outward emotion that day. Everyone on the household staff went on “automatic pilot,” said Curator Jim Ketchum. “I think most of us were intent on carrying on.”

As the usher on duty that terrible day, it was Pierce who got
the official word from a Secret Service agent calling from Parkland Hospital in Dallas confirming the president’s death.

Pierce was steering the ship in unchartered waters. No modern president had ever been assassinated, and never before had there been footage of the event with the violent images playing over and over.

It was the beginning of a long and emotionally draining week. Pierce walked through the White House gates on a Friday and didn’t leave until the following Wednesday night. There was so much work to be done. The first thing he did, in a state of shock, was to call the engineers and order them to lower the flag on the roof of the White House to half-staff. He let himself break down only once—when he saw that flag being lowered. After composing himself, he called the General Services Administration Control Center to notify all U.S. embassies and ships at sea to lower their flags in kind.