A Treasury of Great American Scandals Read Online Free Page B

from Ohio Wesleyan University happened to be visiting on one such occasion and later recalled what happened: Carrie was standing on the front lawn talking to Harding, who was on the front porch. “Suddenly, Mrs. Harding appeared. A feather duster came sailing out at Mrs. Phillips, then a wastebasket. Mrs. Phillips did not retreat. Next came a piano stool, one of those old, four-legged things with a swivel seat by which it could be lowered or raised. Not until then was there a retreat. She tossed him a kiss and left quietly.”
    The affair ended badly when Carrie demanded marriage shortly before Harding was elected president. Possessing all his love letters, she threatened him with blackmail, even though he had already given her a Cadillac and offered her $5,000 a year. Campaign manager Albert Lasker sought to avoid scandal by paying her $20,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip around the world with her husband—under the condition that they leave before the election.
    Overlapping the Phillips affair was another with Nan Britton, who had developed a crush on Harding as an Ohio teenager. She was twenty and still a virgin when they first made love. Their affair continued after he became president in 1921. When Nan visited the White House, they would sneak off to a five-by-five-foot coat closet and squeeze in some sex. Once they were nearly busted by the Duchess. Five minutes after they entered the tiny space, Florence showed up, arms flailing and fire in her eyes, demanding that the Secret Service agent posted at the door get out of her way. When he refused, she ran around the corner to enter the closet through an anteroom. The agent banged loudly on the door to alert the president, who slipped Nan away. Harding had just enough time to slide behind his desk and pretend to be working when the Duchess burst in. Eventually, Nan gave birth to Harding’s baby and published a lurid account of their affair.
    Though the theory that Florence Harding secretly poisoned her husband in the middle of his first and only term has been largely discredited (he died of heart failure), she certainly must have felt the urge. And death, no doubt, was a blessed relief for him.

8
    Smother-in-Law
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    If Eleanor Roosevelt had any inkling just how monstrous her new mother-in-law would be, she may very well have begged new husband, Franklin, to make their European honeymoon permanent. The young bride was facing a formidable lady who liked control, especially over her only child. Sara Delano Roosevelt was so domineering that she even moved near Harvard so she could keep an eye on Franklin while he studied there. Needless to say, she didn’t relish the prospect of sharing her precious son with another woman. “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement,” she wrote in her journal after hearing he had proposed to his distant cousin Eleanor in 1903.
    â€œI know what pain I must have caused you,” Franklin wrote his mother, “and you know I wouldn’t do it if I really could have helped it.” Eleanor, too, tried to be consoling about the announcement Sara was treating like a cancer diagnosis. “I know just how you feel and how hard it must be,” she wrote the woman who would torment her for years to come, “but I do so want you to learn to love me a little.”
    In an effort to placate the threatened matriarch, the young couple agreed to her demand that they keep the engagement a secret for one year, during which time, Sara hoped, the romance might cool. To that end, she took her son on a cruise to distract him from his intended, and even tried to arrange a job for him out of the country. Poor Eleanor had no clue about her future mother-in-law’s machinations and wrote Franklin upon his return from the cruise: “I knew your Mother would hate to have you leave her, dear, but don’t let her feel that the last trip with you is over. We three must take them together in the