The Watergate

by Joseph Rodota

  The scene was “frantic,” recalled Regine Palladin, who helped out in the kitchen for the evening. “Secret Service was everywhere.” When she had to use the bathroom off the kitchen, an agent banged on the door. “Please step out immediately,” he ordered.

  Jean-Louis Palladin served dinner that night to the Reagans and forty-two guests, including Gloria and Jimmy Stewart, CIA director William Casey and his wife, Sophia, and Ted Graber, Mrs. Reagan’s interior designer. Watergate residents at the dinner included the Annenbergs, the Bloomingdales, and Attorney General William French Smith and his wife, Jean. Reagan’s entire Southern California “kitchen cabinet” flew in for the event, including Jane and Justin Dart; Virginia and Holmes Tuttle, an automobile dealer; and Marion and Earle Jorgensen, a steel magnate.

  “If it weren’t for the efforts of this group,” Reagan joked during his toast, “I’d be making this speech before the Chamber of Commerce.”

  Jean-Louis prepared an eight-course meal, including foie gras on toast; scallops with truffle butter and salmon; veal and California asparagus; and ravioli stuffed with wild mushrooms. “It took five hours to do the ravioli,” Jean-Louis said. “We made 150 of them—by hand.” After the final two courses—a salad, followed by a pastry with raspberries and black currant sherbet—a guest pushed herself away from the table. “I’m going on a grapefruit diet for the next week,” she said, sighing.

  As much as the staff enjoyed having the president of the United States dine at their restaurant, Palladin’s chef de cuisine Larbi Dahrouch considered another night at the Watergate to be even more memorable. Salgo asked Palladin to prepare a late-night dinner for Leonard Bernstein and fifteen guests—at three in the morning. A piano was rolled through the underground parking lot into the restaurant and Bernstein gave an impromptu concert for his friends and the entire restaurant staff.

  FINALLY, IN MARCH, CHENNAULT GOT HER MEETING WITH PEN JAMES, who asked her to consider serving on “some commission.” She was clearly disappointed. “My first preference is still to serve as Ambassador at Large,” she wrote Ed Meese after the meeting, but she was willing to consider something else. “I just hope we will not have to wait too long for appointments for people like ourselves who have made very substantial contributions, not only in time, money and effort, but have been loyal and dedicated Republicans over two decades.”

  NICOLAS SALGO RELIED CLOSELY ON TWO PEOPLE TO RUN the Watergate Hotel: Gabor Olah de Garab, the hotel’s general manager, and Bettye Bradley, the concierge.

  Gabor Olah de Garab—everyone on the staff called him Mr. Olah—was born in Pásztó, Hungary, in 1924. After the war, he escaped the Soviet occupation and settled in Italy. He studied hotel management at the École hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland and worked at some of the grandest hotels in Italy, including the Excelsior Hotel Gallia in Milan, the Hotel Splendido in Portofino and the Cavalieri in Rome. Giuseppe Cecchi recruited him in 1967 to become the first general manager of the Watergate Hotel.

  Bettye Bradley was a high school dropout from Atlanta, Georgia. She was seventeen years old when she married a soldier who had served under General Patton in Europe. It was not a happy marriage. After her son Lee Bradley went off to Emory University, Bettye filed for divorce. She moved to Arlington, Virginia, and found work at the Watergate Hotel reception desk. She quickly made herself indispensable, advising guests where to eat, where to shop, even where to rent a helicopter. Within a year, Salgo promoted her to concierge—one of only fifteen certified concierges working in an American hotel, one of only three women concierges nationwide and the first woman concierge at the Watergate Hotel.

  When Salgo took over the Watergate Hotel, in partnership with Continental Illinois Properties, he personally supervised the refurbishing of the hotel’s presidential suites. Antique furniture—“very old stuff,” one hotel staffer recalled—arrived from Europe. But if Mr. Olah wanted to spend money on something, Salgo would often balk. “Two Hungarians,” Bettye said.

  “Mr. Olah was old school,” Bettye recalled years later. “The guest comes first.”

  He was also a bit of a “rapscallion,” she said. While he never overruled Salgo directly, he sometimes found a way to work around him. “We might have to do some hanky panky,” he would tell a staff member who came forward with a request to spend money to satisfy a guest.

  Bettye always carried two black leather address books with the phone numbers and addresses of her contacts—for restaurant reservations, theater tickets, masseuses or masseurs, or anything else a guest might need. She resisted converting her files to a computer. “I think you lose contact with your guest when you stare at an electronic screen,” she said. “It feels good to thumb through my worn pages to find a secret source.”

  She knew when guests awoke (from their wake-up calls), what they liked to eat (from room-service orders) and who visited them. “I wasn’t nosy,” she said, “it was just second nature.” Many famous entertainers made the Watergate Hotel their home while they performed at the Kennedy Center next door—just a six-minute walk, although some entertainers insisted on using a hotel limousine. Many years after Bettye had moved on from the Watergate, she shared stories about her tenure at the concierge desk:

  Bette Davis walked through the lobby, clutching a paper bag. As she waited for the elevator, the bag slipped from her hands and fell to the floor, with the sound of shattering glass. Bettye smelled alcohol. The bag was full of miniature liquor bottles, perhaps from her most recent airplane flight.

  Pearl Bailey came down to the lobby one morning to pick up her newspaper. When a tourist snapped her picture, Bailey screamed at the man, and chased him out the front door and down the sidewalk. She used the large kitchen in her suite one night to cook a roast for Henry Fonda.

  Shelley Winters liked to eat breakfast in the hotel dining room, wearing a bathrobe and slippers.

  The playwright Tennessee Williams had fallen asleep one night while working on his play Clothes for a Summer Hotel. He called from National Airport in a panic: the only copy of the play was missing. Hotel staff retrieved it from behind a headboard.

  When Katharine Hepburn arrived one day, fans sent more than fifty flower arrangements for delivery to her suite. She cooked her own breakfast—brown eggs with a New York strip steak, sourced by Bettye from the Watergate Safeway. Her suite never seemed to be cold enough: She kept her balcony doors open and demanded hotel engineers disconnect the room’s heater.

  Bea Arthur tried to order room service, but the waiter, who was from Korea, couldn’t understand her. After many minutes repeating her order, she gave up. “Fuck off!” she shouted, and hung up.

  The ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev called room service at 2:00 A.M. and asked for a bottle of olive oil to be sent up to his room.

  Composer Leonard Bernstein told Bettye he needed a Sony Dream Machine to help him get to sleep. When she couldn’t locate one in Washington, she put a hotel staffer on a train to New York to purchase one and bring it back before Bernstein returned that night from the Kennedy Center.

  Lauren Bacall “chewed out” a hotel operator over the plastic hangers in her suite. Bettye rushed home, pulled her own clothes out of her closet and installed her personal wooden hangers in Bacall’s suite. When Bacall checked out at the end of her stay, she took the hangers with her.

  After Keith Moon trashed his suite, Mr. Olah threatened to lock him out of the hotel. Moon’s manager personally delivered $5,000 to prevent eviction.

  “Service separates great hotels from mediocre hotels,” Bettye said.

  The Watergate attracted foreign diplomats. And at least in one instance, according to Bettye, the diplomats attracted the FBI.

  Three guests from North Korea checked into the Watergate. They appeared to be enjoying themselves—they ordered lobster off the room-service menu, Bettye recalled. One night during their visit, the FBI rushed into the lobby. The North Koreans were missing, an agent explained, before rushing out again onto Virginia Avenue. The North Kor
eans were actually sitting in a corner of the lobby. When the FBI agents returned, Bettye whispered to one of them, “If you’ll just look around the corner, you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

  The prime minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, held a “top secret” meeting in a suite borrowed for the night from a defense contractor. When he returned to the hotel a few months later for a lunch, the hotel was surrounded by protesters.

  Visitors from Saudi Arabia, Bettye recalled years later, liked to show pornographic movies in their suites.

  Tourists—including an “unbelievable number of Japanese”—came by the Watergate Hotel in droves, she later recalled, to see the home of the famous scandal—unaware, of course, that the break-in had taken place at the Watergate Office Building next door. “They were acting like there was a burglary still in progress,” she said. One day, a woman walked into the lobby and asked to be put on “the tour.” She said a tour bus had just dropped her off and told her to go inside and see where the Watergate burglars stayed the night of the break-in.

  “There’s no tour,” replied Bettye with a smile.

  DECEMBER 6, 1981, TOMMY CORCORAN DIED OF A PULMONARY blood clot at the Washington Hospital Center. He was eighty years old. Anna spoke at his funeral. “He made the most humble person feel important and many presidents have cherished his friendship,” she said. “And what a great teacher he was!”

  Anna lost more than a close friend. She lost a business advisor, a fellow movie buff, a press spokesman and a tireless advocate within the political circles of the capital.

  “He made us laugh, he taught us to sing,” she said. “Wherever he went, there was always music.”

  When Tommy died, she lost her favorite piano player.

  THE REAGAN RENAISSANCE AT THE WATERGATE LASTED about a year. Lee Annenberg was the first member of “the Group” to leave. After only seven months on the job as chief of protocol, living in the Watergate Hotel during the week while Walter managed his media empire from Philadelphia, she submitted her resignation. “I adore my job,” she said, “but my husband comes first.” Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale left shortly thereafter.

  Mary Jane and Charles Wick kept a long-standing tradition and celebrated Christmas Eve in 1981 with the Reagans in their Watergate South apartment, then moved to a house in northwest Washington. The Reagans would not return to the Watergate for three years.

  In the fall of 1981, the hottest-selling postcard around Washington depicted First Lady Nancy Reagan wearing a gold crown studded with jewels and an ermine cape. The caption: Queen Nancy. Shortly after moving into the White House, Mrs. Reagan spent $800,000 in donated funds on renovations and another $300,000 in donations to buy new china. Johnny Carson joked her favorite food was caviar. In July, in London for the wedding of Charles and Diana, she was booed, and mocked by the notoriously snarky British press. Michael Deaver, the White House aide overseeing the First Couple’s public image, was relieved when the Watergate crowd started to disperse. Lunches at Jean-Louis, and the constant round of cocktail parties, were undermining the Reagans’ purpose in Washington, said the first lady’s press secretary, Sheila Tate.

  From the perspective of the battered Watergate, it didn’t matter. According to Peter Buse, a page had been turned. “We are no longer the Nixon Watergate.”

  Chapter Eight: A Nest for High-Flyers

  There is no other place in the world quite like Watergate, and everyone who lives and breathes there knows it.

  Town & Country, June 1982

  REPUBLICAN JOHN WARNER WAS FIRST ELECTED TO THE United States Senate in 1978, but after the Reagan landslide of 1980, in which the Republicans took over the Senate majority, Warner decided it was time to ditch his row house in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood and move into Watergate South, upstairs from his good friends Elizabeth and Bob Dole. When Warner suggested the move to his wife, the actress Elizabeth Taylor, she replied, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  Each of the three Watergate apartment buildings had its own rules and regulations governing pets. Depending on the building, you could have a pet if you owned your apartment, but not if you were a renter. If you combined two apartments, you could have two pets. In one building, concerns about the rising pet population resulted in a temporary rule: If your pet died, you were not allowed to replace it. In Watergate South, each resident was allowed no more than two pets.

  Elizabeth Taylor owned a succession of cats, dogs and birds. She called them her babies.

  In December 1981, a few days before Christmas, Elizabeth Taylor and Senator John Warner announced their breakup. They divorced on November 7, 1982. “What precipitated the separation,” according to a Taylor biographer, “was not an act of infidelity, but rather one of thoughtlessness.” Faced with the choice—her husband or her “babies”—Elizabeth Taylor dumped her husband.

  IN JUNE 1982, TOWN & COUNTRY MAGAZINE PUBLISHED AN eleven-page feature story on the Watergate, Washington’s “next-best power address”—second only to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—and home to “the chicest deli south of Zabar’s”; “the best French restaurant in Washington”; a pastry shop “riddled with Sacher torte and other such sins”; four psychiatrists; and a beauty salon that doubled as “the scene of the best daily gossipfest in town.” “Privacy is rampant if so desired; security is on a soothing par with that of Buckingham Palace.” The only downside: “There is no disco, no golf course and no tennis courts—not even an itty-bitty private one.”

  “The world of Watergate is an intricate intaglio of personalities where no lines are drawn.” Democrats lived across the hall from Republicans. Residents included “presidents of large and small corporations,” lawyers, doctors and “merry widows.” Ambassadors and other diplomats from Europe (Sweden), the Middle East (Yemen, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates), South America (Brazil and Suriname), Asia (Japan and Korea) and Africa (Somalia) were “supremely content” with their Watergate offices.

  The article was accompanied by portraits of twenty-five Watergate residents, posing in their Watergate apartments or offices, or shopping at the Les Champs arcade. “Smiling like a proud father,” Nicolas Salgo posed on the terrace of the Kennedy Center as the Watergate loomed behind him. Ambassador Randolph Kidder and his wife, Dorothy—although he was sworn in as President Johnson’s ambassador to Cambodia, his credentials were rejected by Prince Sihanouk and he returned home in October 1964—posed in the living room of their duplex, surrounded by the “eclectic ambiance” of contemporary art and Louis XV antiques. Stephane Groueff, director of information for the embassy of Oman, posed with his wife, Lil, who decorated their apartment with wicker furniture in order to give it the feel of a beach house. Sargent Shriver, the founder of the U.S. Peace Corps and vice presidential nominee on the Democrats’ 1972 ticket, was “thriving” in his sixth-floor office in Watergate 600. Elizabeth and Bob Dole posed in their living room, enjoying “the early American ambiance of their Watergate digs.” Robert Strauss, who had moved the Democratic National Committee out of the Watergate in 1973, posed with his wife, Helen, in their Watergate penthouse. Decorated primarily in blues and beiges, their apartment contained “an assemblage of objet d’art collected through the couple’s extensive travels,” including vases he picked up in China while serving as U.S. trade representative during the Carter presidency. “One of Washington’s most indefatigable hostesses, Anna Chennault,” posed in her Watergate penthouse, “lavishly furnished with Chinese and Japanese antiques, many from her grandfather’s home in Hong Kong.”

  For her photo shoot, the Countess of Romanones wore a “romantically alluring” evening gown by Pedro del Hierro and a “selection of family jewels.” A ceramic leopard stood guard in her mirrored duplex apartment in Watergate South, decorated by her friend Duarte Pinto Coelho. “Madrid might be her home base,” the caption read, “but the Countess Romanones, an American beauty, enjoys her periodic visits to Washington and New York.” The countess, Town & Country noted, “is presently writing a ne
w book.”

  Aline Griffith was born in Pearl River, New York, in 1923, the eldest of six children. Her father was an insurance salesman. She graduated from college in 1943 with “classic features, a college knowledge of French and Spanish and a lot of what was called then ‘get up and go.’”

  On a blind date in Manhattan, she mentioned an interest in espionage; her date, she wrote later, turned out to be a recruiter for the OSS. He placed her in a three-month stay at “the Farm”—the first OSS training school—from which she was dispatched to Spain. On her first day in Madrid, a handsome young man carried her bags to her room and turned down a tip. In 1947, at age twenty-six, Griffith married him: Luis Figueroa y Pérez de Guzmán el Bueno, the Count of Quintanilla. The handsome twenty-eight-year-old was a painter, and one of the richest men in Spain. The couple’s wedding made the “Milestones” column in Time magazine, which reported the couple met while the bride “was a wartime employee of the U.S. embassy.”

  After Luis’s grandfather passed away, he inherited the family title and Aline became the Countess of Romanones. She became a familiar name on international best-dressed lists, rode horses daily and restored her husband’s seven-hundred-year-old estate in Pascualete, 170 miles southwest of Madrid.

  The count and countess rented and later purchased a Watergate South penthouse, Apartment 1517, with a sweeping view of the Potomac and a large terrace on the top floor. She threw dinner parties for members of the White House staff and the cabinet, including William French Smith. There is no record of either the president or Mrs. Reagan joining the countess at her Watergate South apartment, but Mrs. Reagan did come for dinner in the countess’s New York apartment in June 1985. Earlier that day, a fire had broken out in the basement, leaving the building without power. The countess refused to cancel the dinner; her private secretary called Donald Trump, one of the dinner guests, to see if he could lend her a generator, and the dinner went on almost as planned—the meal was served by candlelight.