DEMOCRATS: Wilbur's Argentine Firecracker

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Speeding without lights down a street near the White House at 2 o'clock one morning last week, the 1973 Lincoln Continental bore five people toward the Jefferson Memorial. Among them was an odd couple: an intoxicated, aging man with a badly scratched face and bloody nose and a hysterical, curvaceous woman. When police halted the car, the woman leaped out and jumped into the nearby Tidal Basin, a 10-ft.-deep estuary of the Potomac River. The man stumbled out after her, just before an officer dragged her to safety. When the police refused to let him drive her home, the man shouted: "I'm a Congressman, and I'll have you demoted."

There were no arrests, but the tawdry scandal quickly became the talk of Washington, damaging a distinguished career and formerly impeccable reputation. The man was readily identified as Wilbur Daigh Mills, 65, the 18-term Democrat from Arkansas who, as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is one of Congress's most influential barons. The woman was soon found to be Mrs. Annabella Battistella, 38, a bosomy stripper who used to style herself "Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker." Now that the firecracker has exploded in Mills' face, he just might lose his seat in Congress and along with it the chairmanship of what is widely regarded as one of the two or three most powerful House committees; his successor as chairman would be Liberal Democrat Al Ullman of Oregon. (See 10 things to do in Washington, D.C.)

According to friends, Fanne formerly performed at the Silver Slipper, a sleazy Washington nightclub shoehorned between a pornographic bookstore and a pornographic theater. On the club's window are photos of scantily clad women in provocative poses and a sign promising AN EXTRAVAGANZA OF BEAUTIFUL, CURVACEOUS GIRLS. Inside, dancers shake to the heavy beat of music thundering from amplifiers and strip to their G strings, as B-girls cadge $2.75 drinks from male customers.

Soon after she met Mills at the Silver Slipper in July 1973, Fanne gave up her $500-a-week job and now has no visible means of support. That August, Mills and his wife Polly moved into an apartment in Fanne's luxury building, the Crystal Towers in Arlington, Va. According to club employees, Mills, usually with Fanne, visited the Silver Slipper about twice a month, where they sat at a small table near an emergency fire exit. Sometimes he ordered magnums of champagne for Fanne and drinks for the house, rarely less than $100 worth in a single evening and on one memorable occasion, it is said, $ 1,700 worth—paid for in cash.

Employees recalled that Mills and Fanne ended one evening with a loud quarrel when she decided that he was paying too much attention to a stripper named Vegas Vixen. Last week the women at the club seemed jittery about their notoriety. "Everybody's nervous —we're not supposed to talk: about it," Natasha, a brunette with deep cleavage, whispered into a customer's ear.

As the stories of the Congressman and Fanne swept Washington, Mills holed up in his apartment. At first his spokesman insisted that Mills had not been in the car; that was greeted with open skepticism on Capitol Hill. By Thursday, a still-cloistered Mills reluctantly issued a three-page statement admitting that he had been in the car after all, but claiming that the incident had been entirely innocent.

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