It seems so quaint now in my memory, a long-ago scandal that nevertheless feels familiar with its stock characters and set pieces, preserved for all time in something like one of those miniature snow-globes. Shake it out and all the predictable pieces are still there: a powerful congressman, unknown to many, but possessed of so much accumulated power over the years that he was drunk on it; a stripper with a fun stage name; and a well-known tourist attraction where their alcohol fueled tryst came to a public conclusion. Annabel Battistella, aka Fannie Foxx the Argentine Firecracker, who jumped into the Tidal Basin on the national mall after a night on the town with her paramour Wilbur Mills, powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, died Feb. 10 at age 84.
It was October 7, 1974, when Annabel ran out of a car being
followed late at night by the police and jumped into the Tidal Basin—the rectangular
pool of water between the Lincoln Monument and the Capitol. In the car was the congressman
with whom she had spent the night partying and arguing at the Silver Slipper
Club where she had performed. (The Silver Slipper, located on 13th
Street, closed in 1981.)
There were still just three networks from which everyone got
their news and there was little or nothing to explore about this episode,
nothing to “interpret”; there were no “hot takes” on Twitter, and nothing about
the story “evolved” over time. It was just what it was—a story so familiar it
might have happened in 1874 or 1924 or 1954. Fresh off his 19th
election as a representative from Arkansas—that’s 38 years in Congress—Mills,
whose Ways and Means Committee vetted most any piece of legislation that
required tax money, was suddenly on the front pages in a way he had never been before.
Thoroughly soused, he showed up at one of Annabel’s shows and delivered a drunken
monologue to jeering reporters. Shortly thereafter, he was stripped of his chairmanship,
left Congress and the public eye in 1977, and spent the rest of his life
recovering from alcoholism.
As for Annabel, the Post obituary told a desultory story of
a bad marriage to a philandering cabaret pianist after leaving her native Buenos
Aires, and her career as an exotic dancer in Miami and later in D.C., where she
met Wilbur Mills. Of her leap into the Tidal Basin that night, she told the
Post it was a desperate maneuver to disappear in the hopes of shielding Mills
from publicity.
Alas.
After an arrest for public indecency in Orlando, Fla., in December
of the same year, she gave up dancing. Moved around with her children. Married
again and settled in St. Petersburg. The Post says she earned degrees in marine
science (!!!!) and business administration.
The episode with Mills occurred just two months after Richard
Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency, a melancholy affair on the leeward side
of American decline. Looking back on the incident in 1981, Annabel told the Post,
“What happened, happened, so that cannot be repaired completely. But sometimes
things can be mended enough to allow you to live comfortably and not be
completely ashamed of yourself.”
XXXX
I recall my first peak at a Hustler Magazine, as a teenager
in the 1970s, and can say without hesitation that it was not in any way
alluring. It wasn’t supposed to be. Larry Flynt, the publisher, wasn’t playing
to anything so fundamental as lust—he was an entrepreneur who knew that there
was a market to be exploited in breaking boundaries, pushing the envelope,
trespassing on taboos. It was all about excess. Some people might have regarded
this as essentially sociopathic—it was, it is—but Larry Flynt was a pioneer and
(I believe) a harbinger of the age of Trump. Unapologetic excess, in-your-face
vulgarity, the flaunting of norms and standards, and a kind of malicious, malevolent celebration of crudity masquerading as democratic virtue. He died Feb. 10 at the age of 78.
XXXX
I have visited San Francisco some six or eight times and
have never—shame on me—gone to the City Lights Bookstore. Its founder and proprietor,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died Feb. 22 at the age of 101. His name and his
life were emblematic of the San Francisco that flourished in the decades after
the World War—a beacon to artists and dreamers, beats and hippies and gay
people and activists; the San Francisco now disappearing (heartbreak!) under a
tidal wave of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, astronomical housing prices and
homelessness. Ferlinghetti published Alan Ginsburg’s poem, “Howl,” and a period
piece of his own that was a landmark—“Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote
the Impeachment of Dwight Eisenhower.”
Of his move to the City after the war and a stint in Europe,
just as the Beat generation was emerging, Ferlinghetti was matter-of-fact. “I used
to make up all these literary reasons why I came out here. But I realize it was
really because it sounded like a European place to come. There was wine, and it
just seemed more interesting than New York.”
XXXX
Rennie Davis, one of the “Chicago Seven” tried for
their role in the “unrest” at the 1968 Democratic convention, died Feb. 2 at
the age of 80.
In my teenage years, I was deeply enamored of “the Sixties,”
and as my peer group degenerated into Disco, I lamented being born ten years
too late. One of my earliest “political” memories is of my oldest brother, who
would have been 14 at the time, being outraged at the televised image of Chicago
police beating the crap out of demonstrators in Grant Park outside the ’68 convention.
Two years later, when four students were shot on the campus of Kent State, I recall
an argument my brother was having with our grandfather, who lived in rural Ohio
not an hour from Kent State. (Many years later, the grievance that many locals
felt about the incident, and their vehemence about “outside agitators” who had
created the disturbance, was still fresh.)
As a defendant in the trial
following the Convention, he was convicted of conspiracy and later acquitted on
appeal. He had been an early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and authored, along with fellow Chicago defendant Tom Hayden, the famous Port Huron Statement.
Davis remained an activist but managed to steer clear of the
dubious paths some of his compatriot followed. “I try not
to be reckless,” Davis told the Post in 1971, “and try to avoid confrontation
that can lead to prison or death, but I’ll never stop working…..”
XXXXXX
If Rennie Davis was a symbol of the political 1960s, then
the Supremes—and the Motown sound—represented the cultural 1960s. Or, anyway,
forever more would be a necessary part of the soundtrack to the 60s. MaryWilson, who died Feb. 8, grew up in a Detroit housing project and as a
teenager hooked up with a vocal group that included Florence Ballard and Diana
Ross. They signed with Barry Gordy’s Motown Records and teamed up with the legendary
songwriting trio of that genre, Holland-Dozier and Holland. Their first number
1 song was “Where Did Our Love Go,” in 1964. I'd venture anyone my age can
hear it in their heads—it had the sound of the city, the church, and the street
corner altogether, smooth and silky and smart.
Mary Wilson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, and moved
to Detroit when he was 3 to live with an aunt and uncle. She absorbed the
grown-ups record collection—jazz and gospel and popular music—as well as
(according to the Post) Doris Day movies. IN elementary school she sang in a
talent show and later began visiting the Motown studio with Ross and Ballard
and singing backup for $2.50 a piece. From 1964 to 1969 the Supremes had 19 top
20 hits, toured the world, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.
XXXXXX
Lubomir Kavalek was an international grandmaster chess
player from Czechoslavakia who died in February (exact date uncertain). As a young
man only recently become an international champion, a fellow countryman summed
up the nature of the game for him when the older man pronounced: “You are now
nailed to the chess board, young man.”
I guess that’s the way it is. I went through a chess playing
spell in my 30s, when I lived near Dupont Circle in DC and would take up games
in the circle park, often with homeless men who hung out there (they were often very,
very, very good). I never quite penetrated even the ceiling dividing advanced
beginners from intermediate wanna-be’s, but I played enough to know why it was something
more than a game. Kavalek
was an assistant to Bobby Fischer, the driven American who defeated Boris
Spassky in a Cold War Contest in 1972 (and later, reportedly, spiraled into
mental illness). Kavalek was playing a tournament in Poland when the Soviets
invaded his country in 1968, and he opted not to return but to join his father
in Berlin where the older man had fled following the Communist take-over in
1968,
In later years, Kavalek wrote about chess for the Washington
Post: Pawn sacrifices in the opening work in mysterious ways.
In an interview with the paper, he said: “Just to think
about it as a game is degrading. It has certain elements of science and art and
some competitive elements that even have to do with sport. It tests your
imagination; it test a lot of things. Sometimes it is not all pleasure.
Sometimes you suffer.”
