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The woman, 38-year-old Annabel Battistella, was a plumage-shaking striptease dancer with the stage name Fanne Foxe. She was billed as “the Argentine Firecracker,” and patrons of the local burlesque circuit were captivated by her elaborate costumes — complete with five-foot-tall headdresses and tropical-colored ostrich and pheasant feathers — as well as the artfulness with which she removed them.
On that particular night, after a boozy party at the Silver Slipper club, where she had performed, she got into a loud quarrel with her married lover. Amid the flow of alcohol and epithets, a friend who was driving them had forgotten to turn on the car’s headlights, attracting the attention of police, who trailed them from the club on 13th Street NW.
A TV crew, alerted by radio traffic on the police scanner, soon arrived.
With her plunge into the Tidal Basin, Ms. Battistella (later Annabel Montgomery), who died Feb. 10 at 84, secured her place in the annals of political scandal. Standing near the car — drunk and bleeding — was her paramour, 65-year-old Wilbur Mills, the gravelly voiced chairman of the tax-writing U.S. House Ways and Means Committee and a man esteemed as a pillar of Bible Belt rectitude and respectability.
The Arkansas Democrat, an ascetic grind who shepherded Medicare and other influential legislation through Congress, was also widely regarded as the most powerful man in government after the president. “I never vote against God, motherhood or Wilbur Mills,” a Democratic colleague once told a reporter.
But on that October morning, Ms. Battistella’s eyes were bruised. Mills’s Coke-bottle glasses were smashed, and his nose was badly scratched. He reeked of alcohol. And his 16-year hold on the federal purse strings was suddenly imperiled.
Washington has a long history of tawdry scandals, but the contrast between Mills’s public persona and the subsequent revelations about his private life — his uncontrolled drinking, his prowling of strip clubs, his regular companionship with a star ecdysiast — drew intense media attention as he headed into his first serious reelection fight in more than three decades.
The Mills incident broke almost two months after President M. Nixon resigned because of the Watergate scandal, and “the press was drooling for something like this to happen, looking for another Watergate,” Bill Thomas, author of “Capital Confidential: One Hundred Years of Sex, Scandal, and Secrets in Washington, D.C.,”…
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