Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  “But you don’t have to pay it, sir,” I replied, thinking of President Kennedy’s mortification at his first month’s personal food bill. “It’s official.”

  But I had miscalculated President Johnson’s concerns.

  “That’s the whole point,” he said. “It’s a political thing. They’re saying I’ve spent more of the government’s money.”

  However, the Congressional evenings were worth every cent to the President. Every vote he won with the Johnson “treatment” counted crucially as he sought to move Medicare, a tax cut, aid to education, and civil rights through Congress while he still had a mandate, momentum and a working liberal majority in Congress.

  Most of these sessions were off the record, with no reporters in attendance. But Congressmen who gave their own accounts afterwards came away impressed at first with President Johnson’s commanding presence and art of persuasion. But as the Vietnam war widened and then widened some more, reports from students at Lyndon Johnson’s White House classroom were at best, mixed.

  As criticism of his war policies grew, some Congressmen took the opportunity to ask sharply critical questions. And when the Johnson treatment and Robert McNamara’s statistics-filled answers no longer satisfied the questioners, the mood of those meetings sometimes became tense. Lyndon Johnson no longer seemed to enjoy entertaining the Congress so much.

  Despite all the Johnsons did to be hospitable, though, the President never felt the isolation that surrounds the Presidency so strongly as he did with his old compatriots in the Senate.

  “It’s so different now,” he told an aide after a long, late-night work session when he was feeling a bit philosophical. “There’s a wall around me that nobody gets through—people I’ve known for years, worked with side by side, like (Senators) Jim Eastland or Allen Ellender—they come in here and they don’t see me, they see the President. I’m now ‘Mr. President’ to my oldest friends!”

  (I remembered a Secret Service agent telling me about poker games on the yacht Williamsburg, hearing Harry Truman’s oldest friend call out “Your deal, Mr. President!”)

  Because of this isolation, Presidents tend to draw closer to their families in the White House. Although by the nature of their responsibilities, the opposite might seem to be the case.

  Lyndon Johnson doted on his daughters. He was more indulgent, it seemed to me, than overprotective. For graduation from National Cathedral School, he presented Luci with a Corvette Sting-Ray, in which she buzzed around town with a Secret Service agent in the bucket seat. Lynda had sold her car, preferring to use the White House chauffeurs.

  “Why should I spend the money to operate my own car when I don’t have to?” she told a Secret Service agent.

  The President depended on the Secret Service to protect his young ladies, and Luci teased her guardians unmercifully. She’d bring her record player down from her room, set it up on the ground floor just outside the Secret Service office door, and play, over and over again, the song, “The Secret Service … makes me nervous …,” from the Broadway show Mr. President. Luci was good-natured, playful and friendly to all the staff. Her notes always were signed with a happy-face she sketched from the letters L-U-C-I.

  In January, when Lynda Bird transferred from the University of Texas to George Washington University, the second floor of the White House took on the character of a girls’ dormitory. Luci’s gang of high-school friends had already been in and out, swarming over the house; now Lynda and her Texas roommate Warrie Lynn Smith moved in next door. (Lynda and Warrie Lynn always kept a flashlight in their bathrobe pocket—to keep from breaking their necks in the pitch-black corridors at night.) Noise and laughter, dates and dramatics echoed through the historic rooms.

  The State Rooms became an essential part of the Johnson daughters’ social life. Margaret Truman had held only one ball in the East Room, as had John and Barbara Eisenhower. But Lynda and Luci kept the staid old halls jumping with the frug, the monkey, the watusi.

  During the first month, the Johnson girls and their friends explored the second floor, the State rooms, the ground floor—looking for hideouts.

  They had their eyes on the third-floor solarium, which at Mrs. Kennedy’s request to Mrs. Johnson, remained a classroom for Caroline and her little friends until the first semester ended in mid-January. (What a poignant sight to see Caroline ride up to the south entrance every morning, step out and wait with her classmates at the elevator, until Miss Boyd took them up to the third floor. At the end of the school day, off she’d go again, into the waiting car. The six-year-old never stopped off at the second floor to see her old room, never went out to bounce on the trampoline. Except for a few sentimental servants, she was generally ignored. Lynda and Luci were the new Princesses.) As soon as the semester ended, and the equipment was packed off to the British Embassy, where the school took residence for the spring term, Mrs. Johnson called me.

  “Luci wants to do Caroline’s schoolroom over as a hideaway for her and Lynda, so they can study, have dates, and entertain their friends—a teen room, in other words.”

  So Luci and I got together. We consulted the decorator, Mrs. Brown from New York, who also decorated the West Sitting Hall for Mrs. Johnson.

  “We don’t want to spend too much money,” Luci kept saying.

  We put in a new cork parquet floor, and new gold loose-weave curtains across all the windows. Then we built a bar down in the carpenter shop—a “coke bar” at that time—and Luci sent me out to look for “cheap” barstools. I found some downtown for about $10 each and had them recovered in the shop downstairs. Luci was delighted.

  “We’re really living it up for ten dollars, aren’t we?” she said. She brought up two record players from her room and Lynda’s; we installed a huge television set, a couple of sofas, and some chairs; and presto—a teen-age hideaway.

  Luci had one more request: “Mr. West, can we please have this glass paned door changed to just a plain wooden door? I don’t want the servants and everybody looking in here to see what’s going on.”

  I had an idea whom she meant by “everybody.”

  Somebody had painted a happy-face on the solarium window when it was converted to a dating room, and Luci left it there for years. She delighted in sneaking in and out of the White House in disguises. Once, in a blonde wig, she spent a weekend, unrecognized, with her friend Beth Jenkins at Marquette University, where she met Patrick Nugent, who then began to frequent her inner sanctum on the third floor. That was one place the Secret Service wasn’t allowed.

  The staff all agreed that Luci was like her mother—friendly, but something of an introvert. Lynda, we thought, resembled her father. She was tall, studious and had a strong emphatic voice. A history major, she drew upon the resources of the White House in preparing her homework, running in and out of the Curator’s office in a fast gallop. After graduation, she went to work for McCall’s magazine.

  Lynda went through somewhat of a metamorphosis in the White House. Her “movie star” phase, when she was dating actor George Hamilton, brought her to a Hollywood makeup artist, and she changed from a tomboy-like college student to a glamorous young woman. But all the time it seemed that Lynda had her eye on the color guard, whose towering young Marine captain was one of the great social assets to a White House evening—a military aide who could present the colors, announce the guests, dance with the ladies, and assist the ushers.

  With young romances on the third floor, Congress up and down the stairs, and meetings all over the place, the Johnsonization of the White House didn’t involve the decor, it involved people.

  The house looked the same, but slowly the Kennedy style was erased, just as the Eisenhower style had been erased previously. Beginning with the departure of Boudin, the gulf between Texas and Paris widened even further at the White House.

  * The daily tapes were edited and published as A White House Diary, in 1970.

  3

  AS THE JOHNSONS SLOWLY injected their own tastes in food and s
tyle, I realized that battles would be brewing between new and old help whose styles were as different as Paris, France, is from Austin, Texas.

  Zephyr Wright was queen of the kitchen on the second floor, and René Verdon, who’d prepared the Kennedys’ personal meals as well as the State dinners, supposedly was limited to official entertaining for the Johnsons.

  With the Johnsons, however, the line between official and personal was hard to draw. Most of the time Zephyr cooked upstairs, turning out meals for four to fourteen, the way she’d done for years. She knew their likes and dislikes so well that she rarely even asked Mrs. Johnson what to cook. Every now and then, though, the Johnsons would hold a more formal dinner party in the second-floor dining room, and Bess Abell would get involved, with René preparing the food.

  We’d brought Zephyr in at $500 a month, her wages as a cook in the Vice Presidential household. She wasn’t in the White House but a few months, however, when she found out that the French chef was making three times that, and immediately thereafter Zephyr came huffing into my office.

  “Mr. West, I demand to be put on a pay scale equal to René’s. Why, I do four times as much cooking as he does!”

  “René is the official White House chef,” I explained. “He runs a big staff, and is in charge of the very important State entertaining. He has very specialized skills and training, and is paid commensurate with his background.” (Although, in truth, René also felt that he was being paid mostly in prestige. No White House salaries, none of them, are on a competitive level with private business.)

  “But I cook for official entertaining, too,” Zephyr argued. “Practically every night! And I have to turn out a big dinner for twenty people on a few minutes’ notice, and I have to stay here until midnight….”

  Zephyr Wright did have a point. On the other hand, those impromptu dinners, late though they were, of necessity involved much use of the can-opener and quick-thaw method of cooking (at which Zephyr was indeed skilled), not the seasoned hands of a gourmet chef.

  Nevertheless, I took up the matter with Mrs. Johnson.

  “It is necessary for her to be on duty to prepare late night dinners,” the President’s wife agreed, and we raised Zephyr’s salary to $625 a month. But Zephyr stuck to her guns, and kept us in a constant battle to have her salary raised to equal the French chef’s.*

  The Johnsonization of the White House was discreet, subtle, but firm. As with each of the First Ladies, Mrs. Johnson was aware of the sensitivities and loyalties of those employees closest to her life. And, also like every other First Lady, she required total loyalty to her family.

  Presidents are peculiar people. They can take public criticism and even abuse, and shrug it off as a political by-product. But close up, they develop ways of examining, scrutinizing, testing every employee. “Are you with me?” is an unspoken question—and somehow the President and his wife can always tell if the answer is “No,” or even “I’m not sure.” The White House employee whose loyalties remain with the previous administration rarely survives long, as in the case of Henrietta Nesbitt—and Anne Lincoln.

  Anne, I believe, truly wanted to remain as housekeeper of the White House. There was always an undercurrent, a feeling that her ties with the Kennedys were too deep. Perhaps she felt a bit frustrated at taking directions from the social secretary, when she’d worked directly with the previous First Lady.

  Mrs. Kennedy had hired the French chef René, whose huge stainless-steel kitchen was like a kingdom unto itself. Anne worked closely with René, because the two of them understood the type of menu the Kennedys wanted to serve. When the Johnsons came in, Anne and René would work up a menu, then they’d have to submit it to Bess, who then would discuss it with Mrs. Johnson. So Anne had very little contact with Mrs. Johnson.

  At any rate, Anne was replaced by Mary Kaltman, a Texan who reflected Mrs. Johnson’s tastes. Mary was primarily a food person, having been in charge of food operation at the Driscoll Hotel in Austin. But she tried at first to take the housekeeping in hand. Mary came in full of vim and vigor, and tried to put into effect a system that would work, in supervising the maids and housemen. She even held little staff meetings with them in the mornings.

  One day she had a call from Mrs. Johnson—“Could you take it a little easier, please,” the First Lady told her, laughing. “You’re ruining the morale of the staff.” One of Mrs. Johnson’s own maids had filtered the word to the First Lady that Mary Kaltman was really going to run a tight ship—and the staff didn’t like it.

  Mrs. Johnson’s rebuke—or advice—took some of the fire out of Mary. She decided she would have to go along with the way the operation was. As Mr. Crim would have said, this was another case of White House tradition prevailing—where the tail sometimes wags the dog. Mary’s heart was in the kitchen anyway, so she looked to that arena as the next place to establish her authority. But the kitchen was run by someone else. I could see that another battle was inevitable.

  It was a personality clash, pure and simple, matching Texas versus French egos. Mary was accustomed to supervising a kitchen in an Austin, Texas, hotel, but nobody supervises a kitchen when there’s a French chef around. Nobody, that is, except the French chef.

  Not only did René feel that his sacred territory was being invaded, but he also was less than enthusiastic about some of the Texas innovations in the official menus. One of the Johnson favorites, chili con queso, which is really a hot, gooey cheese dip, he christened “chili concrete.” And after the President sent his tapioca pudding back to the kitchen, suggesting that he go upstairs and take lessons from Zephyr, René allowed as how Zephyr must put glue in hers.

  “The President eats so much tapioca pudding that Zephyr doesn’t even cook it herself,” René fumed. “She has the pot washer do it.”

  The friction between chef and housekeeper and between rival cooks was beginning to send sparks up and down the White House halls. So one day I stopped by the kitchen when I knew René would be alone.

  Tall and regal in his immaculate white chef’s hat, René leaned over the immense wooden chopping block in the middle of the room, studying not a cookbook but a French newspaper.

  “René, how are you getting along?” I asked, quietly.

  He knew what I meant but rejoined with equal subtlety, “I don’t know.” He paused a long moment, “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know either, I’m not able to assess it too well myself.”

  It was my turn to pause. “Are you happy here?”

  “No,” he said.

  “What would you think of making a change,” I said. It was not a question.

  He agreed and it was all handled on a very calm basis. He left.

  Actually another French chef was waiting in the wings. Swiss-born Henri (which the Johnsons soon converted to “Henry”) Haller. Like René, a Cordon Bleu food artist, Henri had been discovered by Mary Kaltman in the Essex House Hotel in New York. He arrived in 1966, and Zephyr once again was up in arms about her salary.

  “He’s just beginning here,” she complained. “Why should he get more than I do when I have seniority?” I took it up with Mrs. Johnson and once again Zephyr won her raise. The First Lady took that opportunity to bring up another point.

  “Zephyr has been used to shopping for our groceries for all these years and feels a little tied down when the housekeeper orders everything wholesale. She thinks she might be able to keep our food bills down by doing her own shopping for our personal meals.”

  Then Mrs. Johnson sighed, running her hand over her forehead, smoothing down her dark hair. Confronting the food bills once a month gives every First Lady a shock. Somehow, it seems much less when a housewife buys and pays for a weekly load of groceries than it does when the same amount of food is billed in a cold, itemized ledger at the end of the month.

  So once a week Zephyr hopped in the food truck with a security man and made the rounds of her favorite grocery stores. I don’t know whether the Johnsons saved anything on their f
ood bills that way. Zephyr, however, got to save a big batch of trading stamps by going to the supermarkets—a bonus that may have eased her grudge against the higher-paid French chefs.

  Following the Johnsons’ economy directives, Mary Kaltman balanced the budget with the zeal of a home economist, keeping her four separate sets of accounts—official expenditures, personal spending, State Department accounts, and food for the help—juggled neatly and confidentially within the limits of the appropriation. Mary was the first housekeeper we’d ever had with a background in actual institutional management, and Mrs. Johnson was delighted with her efficiency.

  Because Congress had permitted us to feed the servants since the beginning of the Trumans, Mary had $1,000 a month to spend for two meals a day (the servants worked on two shifts) for the thirty-two-person staff. They selected their own menus—not chili or pâté, but plain American Southern-style cooking: fried chicken, pork chops, pigs’ feet, cornbread, blackeyed peas. They ate family style, in the help’s dining room in the lower basement.

  One day, Mary Kaltman called me, all alarmed.

  “We’re missing a ham down in the servants’ kitchen,” she stated. “I bought a whole ham to feed the extra help we hired for tonight’s party, and now it’s gone. Somebody stole it!”

  “Do you have any suspects?” I asked.

  “No, but I think you ought to have everybody searched as they leave tonight.”

  I didn’t, of course, ask the police to search our employees. I did ask Piedro Udo, who cooked for the domestics, to keep a closer watch on things from then on.

  About a month later Udo called, asking for help.

  “There’s an awful stink in the help’s dining room. It’s like something dead. I think it’s in the walls.”

  Shades of Edgar Allan Poe, I thought, calling in the engineers and plumbers.

  “Here it is,” cried “Red” Arrington, as he pried away a section of wall underneath the sink.