by The President's House: 1800 to the Present : The Secrets;History of the World's Most Famous Home
The always imperious “Princess Alice” had quite a bit to say about the arrangements, but her chief interest was in the gifts. As one White House aide remarked, she would accept anything but a red-hot stove “and will take that if it does not take too long to cool.”
No red-hot stoves appeared, but the collection did include mousetraps, bales of hay, feather dusters, and a hogshead of popcorn—all sent by the companies that sold them in hopes of gaining some publicity for their products. To make up for what Alice called the “freak presents,” there was a gold snuff box from King Edward VII of England with his miniature set in diamonds on the lid, a $25,000 string of pearls from the people of Cuba, and some bolts of brocade and silk from the dowager empress of China that provided Alice with evening wear for the next few decades.
The wedding took place at noon. Although sketches of the event show the bride marching down the Grand Staircase on her father’s arm, according to Alice they actually took the elevator down to the State Dining Room and walked through the main hall to the East Room. The ceremony was performed by the Episcopal bishop of Washington and the guests included Roosevelt family members and personal friends, ambassadors, cabinet members, senators, Supreme Court justices, and the president’s favorite hunting guide wearing a frock coat and top hat for the first time in his life.
There were several wedding cakes, including one that was two and a half feet high and topped with a statue of Cupid ringing a silver wedding bell. Alice, who rarely did anything the usual way, cut it with a sword borrowed from Major Charles McCawley of the U.S. Marine Corps, one of the White House military aides.
By four that afternoon, a large crowd had gathered outside the White House, hoping to catch a glimpse of the newlyweds as they left on their honeymoon. There were four different cars parked at various points on the White House grounds. While the crowd was trying to decide which one to keep their eyes on, Nick and Alice went into the Red Room, opened a window, stepped onto the South Portico, and scurried down the steps to a fifth car.
Among those who missed the departure was a movie photographer who had been ordered by his boss to come back with some footage or else. Rather than risk the “or else,” the man hired a car and enlisted a look-alike couple to reenact the scene. With the jerky, blurry film of the day, nobody knew the difference.
IV
Among the guests at Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s wedding was fifty-year-old Ellen Wrenshall Grant Sartoris, better known as Nellie, who had enjoyed an equally glittering White House wedding thirty-two years earlier.
Nellie was fifteen when her father was elected president. She was beautiful, headstrong, and determined to enjoy every bit of the attention she got from being the president’s only daughter. A few years after she resisted her parents’ attempt to send her to boarding school, the Grants decided a vacation from the limelight was in order. Some old friends were planning a tour of Europe with their children, and at her parents’ suggestion Nellie was invited to join them.
Nellie’s European tour turned out to be one long round of party-going—just what her parents had been hoping to get her away from. To top it off, on the return voyage, she met, and fell madly in love with, a young diplomat named Algernon Sartoris, who had just been posted to the British legation in Washington.
Sartoris was rich, good-looking, and well-educated, but in spite of these recommendations, the Grants were less than thrilled with the match. They would have preferred that Nellie marry an American. Moreover, she was only seventeen, and she and Algernon had not known each other long enough to be sure they were making the right choice.
As usual Nellie got her way, although her parents achieved a victory of sorts by making the couple agree to wait a year before announcing their engagement. When the year was up, early in 1874, the announcement was made and preparations for what was later called “one of the most brilliant weddings ever given in the United States” got under way.
The date was set for Thursday, May 21, and the guest list was said to be small. Only 250 invitations were sent out. The wedding was held in the East Room, which had been redecorated the previous summer. The ceremony was brief, and when it was over, everyone adjourned to the State Dining Room for a wedding breakfast that one guest described as being “as elaborate as money and thought could make it.”
I wish I could report that Nellie and Algernon lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, Algernon developed a serious drinking problem and Nellie left him to return to the United States with their four children. Algernon died of pneumonia in 1893 at the age of forty-two. Eighteen years later, Nellie married one of her childhood sweethearts, but a few months after the wedding she became seriously ill and remained an invalid until her death in 1922.
V
I used to think my father was overprotective until I read about Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson and his first wife, Ellen, moved into the White House in 1913, their three daughters—Margaret, twenty-six; Jessie, twenty-five; and Eleanor, or Nellie, twenty-three—were all living at home. I have no problem with that. In those days most young women lived with their parents until they got married. But the president was so fond of being surrounded by his family that he would have been quite content if they never set up homes of their own.
Before his election to the presidency in 1912, Wilson had been governor of New Jersey. The family lived in Princeton and Jessie, the middle daughter, an angelic-looking blonde who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Goucher College in Baltimore, worked at a settlement house in Philadelphia during the week and returned to Princeton on weekends.
One weekend, a friend of the Wilsons, Blanche Nevin, invited Jessie and Nellie to her country home in Pennsylvania. She also invited her nephew, Francis Bowes Sayre, a recent graduate of Harvard Law School, with an eye to promoting a romance between him and Jessie.
Blanche’s matchmaking talents proved to be excellent. Frank and Jessie fell in love at first sight and before long Frank proposed. Since Jessie’s father was in the final days of his campaign for the presidency, they agreed not to say anything until after the election.
Jessie’s mother, Ellen Wilson, was pretty sure what was going on, but her husband was so preoccupied with the campaign that he didn’t have a clue. As he was leaving home one day, he met a young man walking up the steps. The two men smiled and nodded and Wilson later asked his wife who “that nice-looking sandy-haired boy” might be.
“That’s Frank Sayre,” she replied. “And I think you’re going to be his father-in-law.”
It took a few weeks for Woodrow Wilson to get used to the idea of losing one of his daughters, but he finally conceded that he was growing to love his prospective son-in-law and that Frank was “almost good enough for Jessie.”
Frank and Jessie’s engagement was announced the following July and it was agreed that the wedding would take place at the White House on Tuesday, November 25. (The couple insisted on a Tuesday because that was the day Jessie said yes.)
Since the wedding was a private affair, President Wilson let it be known that presents were not to be sent by anyone who wasn’t a personal friend of the couple. Theodore Roosevelt had made the same announcement, to no avail. Jessie was inundated with gifts. In addition to the usual collection of “freak presents” as Alice Roosevelt Longworth called them— washtubs, boxes of soap, coal scuttles, and sacks of onions— the list included a fourteen-piece silver service from the Senate, and a diamond necklace and pendant from all but one of the members of the House of Representatives. That gentleman, Congressman Finley H. Gray of Indiana, claimed the gift was “in bad taste” and chose to make a contribution to the poor instead.
The standing rule for White House weddings is that no one is admitted without a ticket. In this case, the one person who forgot his ticket was Frank Sayre. He arrived at the front gate a few hours before the wedding and the guard on duty refused to let him in. Frank identified himself as the groom but the guard was adamant. Anyone could claim to be the groom, he said. Finally, Frank suggested that t
he guard call his captain. The captain came marching out of his sentry box, listened sternly to Frank’s explanation, and with a slight wink, let him in.
VI
Just as one Wilson daughter’s wedding was winding down, a second was starting up. After Jessie and her new husband left their wedding reception, the party kept going, thanks to her younger sister Nellie, who loved to dance and kept the Marine Band playing for several hours beyond their agreed-on quitting time.
On the evening of Jessie’s wedding her most frequent dance partner was Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, a widower with six children who was almost fifty years old and a grandfather to boot. McAdoo was tall and handsome with courtly southern manners. His business successes had led to his appointment as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and he and Wilson had become close friends during the 1912 presidential campaign.
By the time Jessie and Frank returned from their honeymoon, Nellie and the secretary of the treasury were seeing quite a bit of each other. One evening when the family was together in the second-floor Oval Room, one of the servants announced the arrival of Secretary McAdoo. The president started to get up and then the servant added, “For Miss Eleanor.”
Mac had already proposed once and Nellie had put him off. When he proposed a second time, she said yes. Nellie’s nuptials were smaller and less glittering than Jessie’s, partly because Mac had been married before and partly because Nellie’s mother, Ellen, had not been feeling well. The ceremony took place in the Blue Room and only about one hundred people were invited.
Nellie returned from her honeymoon to find that her mother’s health had deteriorated. Ellen Wilson died in August 1914, leaving her daughters devastated and her husband deeply depressed.
A little more than six months later, Woodrow Wilson met an attractive widow named Edith Bolling Galt and his spirits began to lift. By the end of 1915, another member of the Wilson family got married. This time it was the president, but the wedding took place at Mrs. Galt’s home, not at the White House.
VII
After John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson arrived in the White House with two teenaged daughters. At sixteen, Luci was too young for any serious romance, but the gossip columnists quickly discovered that nineteen-year-old Lynda Bird was dating a young navy lieutenant and supposedly wearing his ring. That started a buzz about an impending wedding, but the chatter ended abruptly when the couple broke up a few months later.
As it turned out, Luci beat Lynda Bird to the altar by more than two years. One of her friends, Beth Jenkins, attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in the course of visiting Beth, Luci met a young man named Patrick J. Nugent. Before long, she and Pat were commuting back and forth between Milwaukee and Washington, but the press never caught on—possibly because they were preoccupied with Lynda Bird’s love life or maybe it was because Luci’s blond wig threw them off the scent.
In the fall of 1965, Luci and Pat made a trip to the LBJ ranch in Johnson City, Texas, to request the president’s permission to marry. As soon as the media got wind of their plans, the White House press office was bombarded with questions and requests for details.
Eventually, all—or almost all—was revealed. The wedding was to take place at noon on Saturday, August 6, 1966. The reception would be held at the White House but the ceremony would be performed at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in northeast Washington. Although it was not generally known, Luci had converted to Catholicism, the religion of her fiancé.
Luci insisted that the design of her wedding dress be kept secret until she walked down the aisle. This produced security precautions worthy of a summit conference. The designer, Priscilla of Boston, was met at the airport by the Secret Service, and the dress was hand-carried to the White House and locked in the Lincoln Bedroom. It was taken out, presumably under armed guard, so Luci could wear it for her bridal portrait, but during the photo session no one was allowed to use the elevators or walk through the White House halls until the all clear was sounded.
Luci’s wedding day dawned hot and humid—hardly a surprise in a city noted for its sweltering summers. During the ceremony, Lynda Bird, the maid of honor, and two of the bridesmaids almost fainted. Another bridesmaid and the matron of honor did pass out.
Even more noteworthy was the way the perennially impatient father of the bride sat still during the entire eighty-fiveminute ceremony. Lady Bird’s social secretary, Bess Abell, reported in amazement, “I do not remember him looking at his watch one single time during the service.”
The only glitch of the day occurred when someone mistakenly packed Luci’s going-away outfit in one of the suitcases she planned to take on her honeymoon. The suitcase was already stowed in the trunk of the getaway car, but Luci refused to leave until the outfit—a deep pink suit with matching turban—was retrieved.
When it was finally found, she changed out of her wedding gown and went down to the South Portico to throw her bouquet, which landed squarely at Lynda Bird’s feet. With this last ritual performed, Luci slipped back upstairs, changed out of the pink suit and turban and into an inconspicuous dark dress and a hairpiece that turned her short hair into shoulder-length curls. At last she was ready to depart.
The newlyweds’ getaway worked out as planned. Luci and Pat went through the tunnel that connects the White House to the Treasury Building next door. There, a nondescript black sedan was waiting in the basement garage. The couple crouched on the floor until they were out of sight of the White House and on their way to New York.
VIII
With Luci married off, the press was free to devote their full attention to Lynda Bird. Her romances, rumored and otherwise, kept them busy. At one point, she was dating a White House military aide, but he was replaced by a medical student who in turn was replaced by the movie actor George Hamilton. The relationship seemed to be thriving but there was no sign of an engagement ring.
After graduating from the University of Texas, Lynda Bird took a job as a magazine editor in New York while Hamilton continued to jaunt around the world making movies. They managed to see each other often enough to persuade the press that marriage was a distinct possibility. Then early one morning in 1967, just about a year after Luci’s wedding, Lynda Bird slipped into her parents’ bedroom to announce that she was going to marry Charles Robb, a marine officer who was the captain of the White House color guard.
George Hamilton, not to mention most of the nation’s working press, was totally surprised by the news. And what news it was. Lynda Bird Johnson’s marriage—scheduled for four P.M. on Saturday, December 9, 1967—was going to be the first White House wedding in fifty-three years.
Lynda Bird’s white silk-satin wedding gown was longsleeved with a high collar and a front panel outlined in embroidered silk flowers studded with seed pearls. Her attendants wore red velvet. The ceremony was performed on an altar surmounted by a gold cross and decorated with ficus trees and masses of greens dotted with tiny white lights. It was over by 4:16 and Lynda and Chuck marched out of the East Room under an arch of swords held by his brother marine officers in their full dress uniforms.
In contrast to earlier White House weddings, there was no hope of barring the press. As a small concession to family privacy, however, the cameras and lighting equipment were hidden behind poles draped in white to match the walls of the East Room and the networks were allowed to shoot only during the wedding procession and at the beginning of the reception—twenty minutes of footage, all told.
IX
In 1971, President and Mrs. Richard M. Nixon’s older daughter, Tricia, became the first, but surely not the last, White House bride to be married in the Rose Garden. Until a few weeks before her engagement was announced, the gossip columnists had failed to notice that Tricia was being seen more and more in the company of a young Harvard Law student from New York City named Edward Cox.
Apparently, the press can only concentrate on one presid
ential daughter at a time, so for a long while their attention was almost completely focused on Tricia’s sister, Julie, who had married Dwight David Eisenhower II, the only grandson of President Eisenhower, about a month before her father was sworn in as president. Julie and David had met some eighteen years earlier when Richard Nixon served as Eisenhower’s vice president. There were dozens of photos of the two of them together as children, not to mention their families’ political prominence, so from the media’s point of view, it was a marriage made in heaven.
I’m sure Tricia was more than happy to have her sister be the center of attention since it gave her a chance to conduct her own romance in private. She and her future husband had known each other since 1964 when Richard Nixon joined a New York law firm after his 1960 defeat for the presidency. They met at a school dance but the relationship took off after Cox, then a Princeton freshman, served as Tricia’s escort at the International Debutant Ball.
Marriage was out of the question because the young people were still in school, but by the time Cox was in his second year of law school, it was a different story. By then, the press had finally begun to notice that Edward Cox was spending a significant number of holidays at the White House and Camp David. For several weeks, rumors were rampant. They were finally confirmed on March 17, 1971, when President Nixon announced Tricia’s engagement at a St. Patrick’s Day reception at the White House.
The wedding was set for four P.M. on Saturday, June 12. Outdoor weddings are always a gamble, even in the normally sunny month of June. Everything was set for a Rose Garden ceremony, but in case of rain, the plans called for moving it to the East Room. I hate to imagine the tension in the family quarters as the weather reports came in. The forecast indicated a fifty percent chance of showers, and as predicted, it began to drizzle about an hour before the ceremony.
