Washington, DC, October, 1974: At 2 am, a pair of US Park Police officers spotted a vehicle with its headlights off zooming past the Jefferson Memorial.
When they pulled over the car, a woman panicked and bolted from the passenger door. She then leaped into the Tidal Basin, a nearby expanse of water from which she was rescued.
The three other passengers were heavily intoxicated. One of them, a considerably older man, had facial cuts and a bloody nose.
He was Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas.
As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Mills was one of the most powerful men in American politics.
The female passenger who had jumped into the water was identified as Ms. Annabel Battistella, the congressman’s neighbor.
She was a highly-paid stripper who went by the stage name Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker.
Washington was still in turmoil two months after the resignation of President Richard Nixon, but the news media quickly latched onto the congressman’s lurid scandal.
Wilbur Mills held sway over congressional appointments for decades. The high ranking Dixiecrat had been in office for 18 years and ran a failed campaign for President in 1972.
Annabel Battistella was born in Argentina. She and her husband immigrated to the US in 1963 and raised a family. Professional dancing was her chosen career, but it didn’t pay well. So Annabel, with her husband’s consent, made money as a stripper and was billed as Fanne Foxe.
At age 65, Mills was married with grown children and had tumbled into alcoholism.
Annabel Battistella aka Fanne Foxe was 37, a married mother of three, and lived in the same apartment complex as Congressman Mills and his wife.
The two married couples met in 1973, played cards, and went dancing together.
The congressman frequented the club where Foxe appeared, the Silver Slipper in Washington, DC., which was two blocks from the White House. Witnesses said Mills and Foxe sometimes had fiery, public squabbles with one another.
At the time the scandal broke, Mills and Foxe had been having an affair for over a year.
Political colleagues gave Mills the benefit of the doubt. He hadn’t been known as a drinker or carouser. There had to be some honest explanation for it all. Besides, Election Day was just a month away.
Mills got re-elected.
Later that same month after regaining his job, Mills traveled to Boston where Fanne Foxe was performing. The congressman appeared onstage with Foxe’s husband, Eduardo Battistella. Mills was totally wasted. Word spread.
Upon returning to Washington, he lost his powerful committee chairmanship and sought help for alcoholism.
Fanne Foxe, however, cashed in on the notoriety. She changed her stage nickname from the Argentine Firecracker to the Tidal Basin Bombshell, which is what the press had dubbed her. Her stripping fee increased tenfold and she packed a club in Orlando.
One year after jumping into the Tidal Basin, she published a short, hastily-penned book in which she admitted her affair with Mills titled The Stripper and the Congressman. She explained why she jumped into the water: she panicked from fear of deportation and political scandal.
She appeared on TV talk shows and in Playboy magazine, got cast in low-budget movies, and acted in an off-Broadway show.
After Foxe and her husband divorced, she used her newfound wealth to buy a house in Connecticut. She moved there with her three children and retired from performing.
Wilbur Mills remained in office until his term ended in 1977. His wife stayed married to him until he died in 1992.
Years later, Annabel relocated to Florida, remarried, and divorced again. She took on her second husband’s surname for the rest of her life and was Annabel Montgomery.
In middle age, she entered college and received MBAs in marine science and business administration, graduating magna cum laude.
Also late in life, she became a diving instructor.
Annabel Montgomery died in 2021 at age 84.
Despite the scandal that irreparably sullied his reputation and for which he is most commonly remembered, Arkansas has roughly a dozen streets, buildings, parks, and structures named after Wilbur Mills.
Comments