11. Fanne Foxe and the tidal basin escape attempt
Fanne Foxe was a stripper of little note until on the night of October 9, 1974, the car in which she was riding was pulled over by US Park Police officers, at around two in the morning. With her in the car was Congressman Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who was driving, without lights, and had been drinking. As the officers approached the car Foxe leaped from the vehicle and tried to escape the scene by jumping into the nearby Tidal Basin. The press was ecstatic over the story of a drunken stripper and the powerful congressman, though Mills’ wife was not. Gradually the scandal faded from the headlines, but not before Mills won re-election to his seat in Congress in the election of 1974.
Less than a month following his re-election, Congressman Mills attended a performance by Fanne Foxe in Boston’s Pilgrim Theater, as the guest of Foxe’s husband. Afterward he held a brief, impromptu press conference from the stripper’s dressing room, apparently quite drunk. Following the second indiscretion, he announced he would resign from the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee and seek help from Alcoholics Anonymous for his drinking issues. Mills never expressed much in the way of remorse from his actions with Foxe, nor did he demonstrate public embarrassment for his antics with the stripper, but in 1976 he declined the opportunity to run for his seat yet again, ending 38 years of representing the people of Arkansas.