Sexual Congress

If you can't get laid in Washington, you can't get laid. --Anonymous

"I didn't know it was going to be like this. I just want someone to love me. I'm going to advertise for a boyfriend every time I go on a talk show."

Elizabeth L. Ray--yes, the Liz Ray--was feeling down. She had done it all: escaped her Appalachian North Carolina origins, dated Joe DiMaggio, worked the studio scene in Hollywood, star-fucked her way through the nation's capital, gained instant fame and national notoriety by blowing the whistle (for a change) on her lover-keeper, Congressman Wayne Hays. Andnow, on this day, she had just published a book--The Washington Fringe Benefit--that stood to sell 1,000,000 copies (continued on page 227)Sexual Congress(continued from page 177) and make her $100,000 before Christmas. But she was alone and lonely. Liz Ray had been so loyal to her Congressional sugar daddy that she, unlike the proverbial hooker, did not even have a secret boyfriend, a real lover on the side with whom she had to fake nothing. She was nearly in tears when she said: "I don't even have anybody to take me out on the biggest day of my life." I wound up taking her to dinner.

•

Lured by visions of instant glamor, they stream into the capital every summer, their freshlyinked diplomas clutched to their tender, not-yet-sagging bosoms. They are the girls of Washington, the ladies of Capitol Hill and the White House and Foggy Bottom, the secretarial graphite that sometimes makes the sticky machinery of the Government move. And about three quarters of them seem to come from the South. Liz Ray did.

In the South, there are only two places for a young lady to go to get away from home: Atlanta is the good time and Washington is the big time. To Southerners, Washington is North: to Northerners, it is South. You can get grits for breakfast at Sherrill's lunchroom just up from the Library of Congress. The predominant vernacular is Southern. In her book Laughing All the Way, a raucous confession about her pilgrimage from Raleigh, North Carolina, to the inner circles of Lyndon Johnson's White House, Barbara Howar explains why she quit the South for Washington: "I was too good to marry the hometown boy and drown in hometown boredom....[But] a Southern accent does come in handy."

Southern women come to the capital hoping for a sliver of power and glory to attach themselves to; they soon find out it is not the young legislative aides and executive go-fers who have it. Powerful men are usually married men. The women hear about the city's legendary nine-to-onegirl-boy ratio and resign themselves either to being adulterous or to staying home. Yet they all fantasize about the big hit from a Senator prince who will walk into the office one day and sweep them oft in a long black Caddy with a low license-plate number. "In any other city." wroteBlair Sabol in The Village Voice, "a secretary is considered low-life, but a secretary in Washington has stature....You are at the center of power."

Washington is utterly male dominated. The men there have outsized egos and prefer submissivewomen. From the snazzy-looking chicks who punch buttons (and read paperbacks) in the Congressional elevators to those who have the go-fer jobs in the Executive branch, Southern girls are everywhere in Washington. You won't meet many Vassarites or smart Jewish girls from the Bronx on Capitol Hill. "A threatening woman, a woman good at what she does, is not welcome in this town," says Richard Reeves, New York magazine's Washington columnist. "This is definitely a town where the men luck down and the women fuck up. In New York, a smart woman fucks at her own level."

Listen to one former Southern secretary in Washington: "When you are from a small town in Louisiana like I am, you're just blown away by all these important, famous people walking into the office. One day, one of them asked me to have a drink after work--everybody has a drink after work. And then suddenly I noticed he was taking an interest in me. Of course, he was married--all the important men are. I knew it could mean trouble, but I was really overwhelmedthat this smooth, sophisticated guy was talking to me. I mean, just three months before.I was worrying about what to wear to church on Sunday. Suddenly, I was in bed with power; then I was hung up on him before I realized what was happening."

•

We put the top down on Liz's brown Corvette and headed out for Alexandria in the heavy humidity of Washington. Liz is appealing without being really beautiful. She photographs better than she looks. From where I was sitting, she seemed a bit thick in the neck and was growing a double chin that worried her. "I'm going to a plastic surgeon to have it fixed," she volunteered, her eyes darting back and forth from the road to me. Yet Liz has at once a voluptuous body and a fragile femininity: she is 5'4" tall and small-boned. Pale-blue eyes and creamy skin are the marks of her Scottish-Irish mountain origins.

"I won't talk about Mr. You-know-who," she said, "because the Justice Department won't let me." This was Liz's coy reference to Wayne Hays. She wouldn't mention any other Famous Names she had slept with, because the lawyers wanted upwards of $50,000 and indemnification against a libel suit first.

Liz was speedy, nervous, simple and still the linguistic prisoner of hillbilly high school. She pronounced "feelings" as "fillings." Her mind flew off in all directions at once. She was overwhelmed by her sudden notoriety, never really sure she was the front-page story she had become. Liz craved publicity, but she was angered and frustrated by the journalistic world that kept her phone ringing in an Arlington, Virginia, high-rise overlooking the interstate highway. Athome, she flounced around in a constant dither, yelling at her lawyers, meeting with FBI agents, complaining to confidants at The Washington Post, beseeching her shrink for advice on how to get more sleep. She sometimes made phone calls at 6:30 in the morning while sitting in the bathtub, or at one A.M. while sprawled on the fake white fur covering her king-sized bed.

Wherever she went in Washington, Liz was accompanied by a nurse. The nurse's job was simply to see that she did not go over the brink. Her instant fame had cast Liz into such sudden, awful lonesomeness; she had no one to spend time with her, no real friends with whom she did not have to lie about her age (33). On the advice of her shrink, Liz hired a nurse-companion at $85 a day. The nurse followed her wherever she went, padding along in noiseless soft-soled shoes and a starched nursing uniform to interviews with reporters and meetings at the Justice Department. She carried Liz's raincoat just in case the Washington mugginess turned to falling drops. She even slept in on Liz's red crushed-velvet couch.

•

According to the news, Washington is a city of dirty old men and pretty young women. Wayne Hays had Liz Ray. Representative John Young of Texas was getting it in his office from Colleen Gardner on what amounted to a political casting couch. Senator Mike Gravel was charged with getting Liz Ray on a houseboat on the Potomac, a liaison Gravel insists never took place. Congressman Joe Waggoner, Jr., was accused of propositioning a police-decoy prostitute and beat the rap after the cops chased him for six blocks. What's going on?

"Hell, a Congressman could shit on the street here and the cops wouldn't book him." This is a Southern journalist talking about the Alice in Wonderland quality of capital life. "Nothing surprises me here--it's like an aberration, a land unto itself. It's the Washington permissiveness. A lot of these Congressmen come here from small towns and act like 18-year-olds going off to college. Pussy seems to he the only catalyst for reform. Wilbur Mills and Wayne Hays had misused power for years, but it took Fanne Foxe and Liz Ray to move Congress to do something about them. They have to be caught literally with their pants down to get change."

•

Liz's long bleached-blonde hair was streaming in the damp night air. Now she was upset about her book. She had not had time even to read the final version, which had arrived that morning, but she knew the manuscript had been severely cut. I had read it and she asked what I thought. "Liz, it's not really a political expose, because you don't name names. And it's not a good fuck book, either, because everything is reduced to one-liners like 'And I sucked him off.' "

Liz was livid. "Oh, those people at Dell ruined the book!" she screamed. She wanted to write kinky sex, but most of it was deleted. "They must have taken out all the good parts, like the scene with the priest." The priest is a character in Liz's book who, having decorously removed his clerical jacket and collar, is seduced by a classic Liz Ray blow job. The entire sex scene is reduced to a single, dry paragraph in the book--a loveless quickie. "I wrote nine pages about that night, with all the atmosphere and the things in his room," she said girlishly.

To judge by Liz's book, blow jobs are the true coin of the Washington realm. "No matter which way or where you go about things," she wrote, "the legitimate job is always second to the blow job." She means, of course, that for a woman to get ahead in Washington, she has to spend a lot of time on her back. Or on her knees. Of course: If ego stroking is the abiding need of overweening politicians (was Wayne Hays not overweening?), then what more appropriate sexual metaphor than a girl on her knees behind the Congressional desk? Your basic master-slave scene.

The Congressional axiom was always: If you want to get along, go along. The secretarial corollary on Capitol Hill must be: If you want to get ahead, give head. They're giving a good thing a bad name.

•

I have never seen a town where it is so easy to score after midnight. Or even just before the mandatory two-A.M. bar closing. If they want to go out, the 162,000 unmarried young women of greater Washington often must go out alone. Check the hangouts on M Street or Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown: They stand up at the bar at Clyde's and dance with any comer at Winston's; they make the disco scene at Tramp's and eat last-serve French food at Le Pam-Pam Bistro Français. One recent visitor to Washington had three impromptu dates in a single evening, switching from one to the next as he moved from Capitol Hill at five o'clock to a lawn party off Massachusetts Avenue at seven to a bar in Georgetown at ten. When better bait surfaces, bite. The atmosphere, again Southern, is friendly and open; the ladies are obliging. This is really no different from Atlanta or Dallas on a good, warm night; it's just that there are proportionately so many more of them in Washington.

•

We found a small Italian restaurant in Alexandria; Liz ordered scaloppine and artichoke hearts; I ordered a bottle of Soave. Liz was self-conscious: "Do you think anybody recognizes me?" She drew sidelong but mercifully silent glances from waiters and patrons. Liz needed recognition but did not know how to handle it. She was thrilled when little old ladies in Garfinckel's, Washington's leading department store, approached her in the beauty salon with copies of her book to be autographed. She grinned and signed from under die hair drier. Once she called me at seven in the morning to complain of the media pressures she was suffering--then she squealed: "Oh, there I am, there I am on The Today Show! News clips thrilled her. She jumped up and down when she saw herself on the cover of the supermarket tabloid The Star, which serialized her book, but she never read the accompanying stories.

Liz was image-conscious. While sex was obviously her bag, she wanted to clean up her act, a traditional Southerner's atavistic yearning for respectability. She turned down an offer to do a dirty movie. She threatened a lawsuit if Hustler primed her pictures. Yet she was eager to peddle three-year-old shots of herself in the classic Marilyn Monroe profile pose, stretched out on a satin sheet. They had even been taken at her request by Tom Kelley, the venerable photographer who had done die historic Monroe shooting.

Liz had been an illegitimate child who never saw her father. In her book, she speaks of her sexy, "utterly untamed" mother, Robbie, "who could always find a way to sneak off ... with her latest beau." And: "I was glad I looked like Robbie, but the last thing in the world I wanted was to end up like her."

•

Public relations in Washington is party giving. Lobbyist Kenneth Gray, formerly a Representative from Illinois, is said to lie the well-heeled representative of big oil interests called Elan Bright in Liz's book. Gray well understood that having a list of ladies who would reliably put out at small, intimate parties on a houseboat was one of his most persuasive professional tools. The wide, meandering Potomac River flanking the city is a proximate locale for private escapes (and escapades) from Washington--a water-borne lovers' lane.

The art of influence peddling is a party art in Washington. Consider Tongsun Park, a mysterious Korean millionaire who constantly bags mammoth shipping and rice deals through his Washington friends in high places. Park, who is usually accompanied by a lovely, tanned lady of Virginia origins, maintains a $480,000 private home in the posh northwest quadrant of the city. He also founded the sedate, exclusive George Town Club in a restored Colonial house oil Wisconsin Avenue. Park gained notice for a birthday bash he threw there two years ago for House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill. He once paid for the Caribbean vacation of Betty Ford's chief of staff and her husband. After the press reported it, the White House began an investigation and she left her job. Later, her husband committed suicide.

Peter Malatesta, a California import who is Bob Hope's nephew and Frank Sinatra's drinking buddy, has become a pre-eminent Washington host. Malatesta came to the city as Spiro Agnew's "unofficial advance man" and hung around afterward. Those in the Agnew crowd were the secret swingers of the Nixon era; they brought the ways of Hollywood to the otherwise dull capital. "There was a real lull during the Nixon years," Malatesta admits, "so I went into a house on 24th Street with Sinatra. We started giving the best parties in town. With Frank around, it was a high-profile place."

Malatesta now runs the members-only Pisces Club in a Georgetown basement decorated in Vegas--Miami Beach Gothic, including a clattering indoor ice-blue waterfall. It is designed to segregate nouveau Beautiful People from regular folks; old men may stagger about drunkenly with impunity here. Around midnight, there is no lack of svelte, Caribbean-tanned ladies at the cushy bar. Malatesta sees no harm in doing God's work for man's more urgent needs; he is rather proud of his new role as jet-set social chairman. "Say a guy is coming in from the Coast, I know six or eight girls to call to get him a date," he says.

This is, of course, no different from what a well-connected bachelor in any town does for his buddies. It's just that the guys coming to Washington are often politicians or other types on political errands. Politics is the juice in Washington, like Mafia contacts in Vegas. What goes around comes around; sooner or later, the linchpin between a visitor and the power he wants to connect with may be a soft, wet, warm thing surrounded by fine hair. If the story is true, Ken Gray arranged for Liz Ray to ball Mike Gravel on the houseboat to secure the Senator's vote on a pet public-works bill. "If truth be known," wrote Liz, "[it] should be called 'the Ray Act.'"

"The function of PR in this town," comments Richard Reeves, "is not getting people's names into the paper--it's bringing people together. The party givers are always trying to get Woodward or Bernstein to the receptions. See. a media star is one cut above a Congressman in the pecking order. There are always loads of beautiful, unattached women at these things. If you leave with a lady you met there, the host figures he has points with you. So it is in his interest to have them around. That's how the system works."

And listen again to the departed Southern secretary: "The wives? Of course they know those late nights their husbands say they're working are not all spent at a desk. It is so widespread in Washington that there is nobody left to blow the whistle on anybody else. So what is the wife going to do--be indignant and leave her nice house in Virginia and all the glamor that she still gets out of it and take the kids back to Momma in Villesburg and put up with the hicks again? Hell, no. She just accepts it. Maybe she drinks a lot.

"The bad thing for a single girl is, I this life never leads anywhere. It just goes around in a circle. Once you're caught up in the whole thing, there are only j two ways to stop: Get married or get out." I got out."

•

I Liz nibbled at her dinner and barely sipped the wine. It was her first calm moment in weeks and she was symbolically crying on the nearest shoulder-- mine. Liz was always chasing the ghost of Marilyn Monroe (with long blonde hair and tits like hers, I might, too). It was a vision that enthralled her during a backwoods education that apparently consisted of equal parts comic books and screen mags. She knew her primary appeal lay between her legs, not her ears. Women have always jumped social rank via the bedroom. The only difference between Liz and hundreds before her was that she was not quite wily enough to push one of her secret suitors over the edge of the commitment threshold--into getting a divorce and marrying her. Many others have or, failing that, decided to cut bait and head back to the action in Raleigh or Atlanta. Liz woke up one day and saw herself 83 years old and not getting any younger; she had damned little to show for it. She had given a lot of fellows a lot of fun and had not even drawn a hooker's pay for it. Judging by the pseudo-Spanish furnishings in her apartment, Liz did not make out.

Sin's wages will finally come her way from her revelations and her book. She may make another $100,000 from interviews, nude photo shootings and the movie to be made from her book--with Liz as star. But at least half of that money will go to Uncle, so Liz has maybe three to four years' worth of very modest living left. Then, as one marriage-minded lady asked, "What's she going to do? Nobody will ever hire her, and who would want to marry her?"

No one is more conscious of this than Liz, who finally struck me as a rather tragic figure--duped by her pretty-girl upbringing and her insatiable urge to be everybody's pinup. "What am I going to do?" she asked. "I still want to be an actress, but now everybody knows my real age [she had been saying 27]. When this whole thing dies down, nobody will want to talk to me again." Liz did not understand that she had boxed herself into the loneliest corner in the world, that she had ridden the carrousel too far too fast and too long, and that everyone else had already gotten off. "Why am I so alone?" she groaned.

We cranked up the out-of-tune Corvette and drove back to Arlington. At her apartment, I asked Liz what she would do differently in her life if given another chance. There was absolutely no humor in her thin, wavering voice when she answered: "Learn to type."