Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (23 page)

Clean-freak fact: The fear of dust is called
koniophobia
.

Martha Mitchell is largely forgotten now, but at the height of her fame in the 1970s, she was one of the most popular women in America
.

T
HE MOUTH OF THE SOUTH
On November 21, 1969, Martha Beall Mitchell, wife of Attorney General John Mitchell, gave an interview on the
CBS Morning News
. Her husband had been on the job for nearly a year, and in that time she hadn’t attracted much attention. Her TV appearance changed that. She came out against Vietnam War protestors, whom she denounced as “liberal Communists…As my husband has said many times, some of the liberals in this country, he’d like to exchange them for the Russian Communists.” Nixon administration officials cringed when they saw the show; they wondered how bad the fallout would be…until letters started pouring into the White House
supporting
Martha.

SPEAKING HER MIND

Suddenly people were interested in Martha Mitchell. She cut quite a figure: A native of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, she was a 51-year-old Southern belle whose loud clothes, big hair, and cat-eye sunglasses competed with her big mouth for attention.

But the big mouth
always
won. Martha had an opinion on everything—she loved Richard Nixon (one of the funniest and sexiest men in America) but hated liberals (communistic), teachers (too liberal), lawyers (they’re lawyers), the Supreme Court (too liberal), the press (too powerful), and universities (too liberal).

She didn’t agree with everything Nixon did, either, and she wasn’t afraid to say it: Nixon appointed only men to the Supreme Court; Martha wanted a woman. The Vietnam War, which Nixon showed no signs of ending, as he’d promised to do on the campaign trail? “It stinks!” she said. The courage and spunk she showed in speaking her mind struck a chord with the American public and made her very popular, even with people who disagreed with her. In one poll, she was voted one of the 10 most-admired women in the world. She was the second-most-requested speaker for Republican fundraisers after the president himself. If you mentioned “Martha” in conversation in the 1970s, everyone knew who you were talking about. She was the most famous Cabinet wife in American history.

All gas has mass. (Even the gas you pass.)

MARTHA-GATE

Nixon and his staff encouraged Martha’s antics—even her late-night calls to reporters when she may have had a little too much to drink. They believed the administration was actually benefiting from her fame…until June 17, 1972, when five men were caught breaking in to the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.

Martha’s husband, John, was a central figure in the Watergate scandal; he sat in on the meetings where this and other “dirty tricks” were planned. It would take more than two years for the details to become public, but Martha already knew much of what was going on, because in addition to being a big mouth, she was also a world-class snoop—when John met with his co-conspirators in their home, she eavesdropped from the stairway. When he talked on the phone, she listened in on the extension in the bathroom. When Mitchell went to bed, she rifled through his briefcase and read his secret documents. He eventually bought a briefcase that locked, but Martha got into that one, too.

IN THE DARK

John and Martha were in Southern California on political business when the break-in was foiled; by then Mitchell had stepped down as Attorney General to run Nixon’s reelection campaign. When Mitchell dashed back to Washington, D.C., to contain the scandal, he left Martha behind in California, without telling her what was going on. Then, when Martha read about the burglary in the newspaper, John Mitchell ignored her frantic calls for three entire days. That sent her into such a frenzy that she made one last call and left a message with an underling to tell John that 1) she was leaving him unless he got out of politics
right now
, and 2) her next call was going to be to UPI reporter Helen Thomas.

That
call got Mitchell’s attention—how could the White House pretend Watergate was just a “third-rate burglary” if Martha was spilling the beans to the press? Someone made a quick call to California; moments later a Nixon staffer burst into Martha’s room and ripped the phone out out of the wall. Then several aides held her down while a doctor injected her with a sedative against her will—“they pulled down my pants and shot me in the behind!”—and held her as a “political prisoner,” she claimed, for several days.

Many shampoos and lipsticks contain
stearic acid
. What is it? Another name for beef fat.

Sedating Martha was only a temporary “solution”—Nixon and his cronies couldn’t keep her out of the public eye forever. So they began leaking stories to undermine her credibility, saying she was an alcoholic (she did have a drinking problem), mentally ill (false), and an airhead who knew nothing. The strategy worked: Woodward, Bernstein, and other reporters apparently never saw her as a major source for the Watergate story.

BITTER END

The Watergate cover-up failed, of course, and as the scandal began to threaten Nixon and his top aides, John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, they tried to save themselves by setting John Mitchell up as a scapegoat. Martha turned on Nixon with a vengeance, telling reporters that the cover-up scandal went all the way to the top—to Nixon himself—and calling for his resignation in late-night calls to reporters even as John continued fighting to save the president’s skin. Watergate placed an unbearable strain on their marriage; in September 1973, John Mitchell moved out of their apartment and filed for divorce.

Martha played no direct role in Watergate, and yet she is arguably one of its biggest victims. John Mitchell never saw or spoke to her again, and she became estranged from her 12-year-old daughter, who blamed her for John’s problems. So did Mitchell—when he was sentenced to prison in 1975, he said, “It could have been worse. They could have sentenced me to spend the rest of my life with Martha Mitchell.”

The strain of Watergate may have even sent Martha to an early grave. In October 1975, she was diagnosed with an incurable form of bone-marrow cancer. For the rest of her days she wondered if the shot she received in California caused her illness. The following May she died, never having reconciled with her daughter. Now, more than 30 years after Watergate, Martha’s most lasting claim to fame may be what psychiatrists have dubbed “The Martha Mitchell Effect.” That’s what it’s called when someone is mistakenly diagnosed as delusional, only for it to be revealed later that their “delusions” were actually true.

Israel is about the size of Massachusetts, and has about the same population.

Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert is so good at parodying arrogant news hosts that it makes you wonder if he’s really pretending
.

“I’m not a fan of facts. You see, facts can change, but my opinion will never change, no matter what the facts are.”

“Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know some of you are going to say, ‘I did look it up, and it’s not true.’ That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut.”

“I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out of plastic for three cents a unit.”

“All God’s creatures have a soul. Except bears. Bears are godless killing machines.”

“It’s never okay for men to cry. Man holds it in until his eyeballs swell to the size of baseballs, his throat feels like it’s about to explode, and his gut just aches like there’s a snake wrapped around his heart. That’s why we die earlier, but it’s worth it. At least we don’t look weak while we’re alive.”

“I’ve never been a fan of amphibians. They are nature’s fence-sitters. Come on, amphibians, which is it? Water or land? Pick one!”

“Like any good newsman, I believe that if you’re not scared, I’m not doing my job.”

“Just because the Pope is infallible doesn’t mean he can’t make mistakes.”

“If these foreign newspapers have nothing to hide, how come they don’t print them in English?”

“Why do we have to wait for elections? Why not have every elected official have electrodes implanted in their chest? If they don’t please us, every morning, we stop their hearts.”

“America has a simple deal with the wealthy: we cut their taxes and in return they inspire us with their golden toilets and trophy wives.”

“There’s nothing wrong with stretching the truth. We stretch taffy, and that just makes it more delicious.”

Wich-craft: The average American eats 200 sandwiches a year.

THE MUSIC MAN

Do you like electronic music? Then raise your glass and drink a toast to Thaddeus Cahill
.

M
UZAK MAKER

In 1893 an inventor from Washington, D.C., named Thaddeus Cahill was experimenting with telephone transmissions when he had a novel idea: He noticed that when an electric generator, or
dynamo
, sent current down a phone line, it created a tone in the earpiece. And different frequencies of current created different tones. Cahill quickly realized that if he had
12
dynamos—each corresponding to a note on the scale—he could send music over phone lines. He spent the next four years perfecting the idea, and in 1897 received a patent for the
Telharmonium
, not only the world’s first significant electric musical instrument—but the first one that could be potentially heard by thousands of people at once.

Think about it: At that time (and for all time before that) if you wanted to listen to live music, you had to be within hearing distance of the person playing the instrument. The phonograph was becoming popular—but that was
recorded
music. And the popularity of the radio was decades away. Cahill envisioned hiring serious musicians to play “respectable” music, such as Bach and Chopin, on his telharmonium, and sending it over phone lines to restaurants, hotels, and other paying subscribers—even individuals—miles away.

HOW IT WORKED

The telharmonium (or the
dynamophone
, as Cahill sometimes called it) was basically a gigantic electric organ. It had two keyboards—one on top of the other—and hundreds of wires running to generators, transformers, and various other electrical parts that sent current down the line. And to magnify the sound, he called for large paper cones that could be fixed to the earpieces of telephones (the precursor to the loudspeaker).

• When the telharmonium was turned on, an electric motor turned the shafts of the 12 dynamos, known as “tone shafts.”

Bats, like cats, groom themselves.

• Each dynamo had a four-foot-long metal shaft packed with metal disks (picture a barbell packed with weights). The disks, or “tone wheels,” had different numbers of differently-sized teeth on their edges. As they rotated past the coil, the teeth would produce varying frequencies of electricity, which would, in turn, produce different notes.

• Pressing a key moved a magnetic coil—the
pickup
—toward one of the tone wheels, creating an electrical charge—and a tone—that would then be sent down a phone line.

• Those tone wheels, 145 of them on the 12 tone shafts, gave the telharmonium a five-octave range with 36 notes in each octave. But that’s not all they did.

THE FIRST SYNTHESIZER

A quick music lesson: When an oboe, a piano, and a trumpet each play the same note, the fundamental note is the same, but the sound is very different. That’s because the physical nature of each instrument creates different overtones, or “harmonics,” along with the note, giving it a unique sound. The telharmonium—using all of those different tone wheels—was designed to add those harmonics to the fundamental notes in order to mimic different instruments, making it the world’s first synthesizer. (Cahill even used the word “synthesize” in his patent.) A row of draw bars above the keyboard could be pulled out to different “stops” affecting what harmonics would be added; for example, you could set it to play “oboe.” The result of all this was an incredibly flexible machine that could mimic woodwind, brass, and even stringed instruments. Two skilled players—it was meant to be played by two at once—could virtually play a symphony on the telharmonium.

BIG DEBUT

Cahill built his first test model in Washington in 1901 and then got some investors to finance building a larger one. In those days, generators had to be big to create a lot of current, so Cahill’s machine was huge—more than 60 feet long and weighing over 200 tons. He had it shipped to “Telharmonic Hall” at Broadway and 39th Street in downtown Manhattan (it took 12 train cars to carry it), and started the New York Electric Music Company. He then got the New York City telephone company to agree to lay lines for the “telharmony” transmissions.

The human eye can distinguish about 500 different shades of gray.

The telharmonium’s big debut was on September 29, 1906—and it was a huge success. Before long Cahill had sold subscriptions to such venues as Louis Sherry’s restaurant, the Casino Theatre, and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. One of the best reviews came from the first private subscriber, Mark Twain. “Every time I see a new wonder like this,” he said, “I have to postpone my death. I couldn’t possibly leave this world until I have heard it again and again.”

BEGINNING OF THE END

But there were many problems with the newfangled instrument, and these would soon prove to be insurmountable. The most obvious one was the cost. Cahill built a third telharmonium in 1911, for an unbelievable $200,000 (the equivalent of $4 million today) and his investors were unhappy with the rate of return.