"The Stripper and the Congressman" (They Boinked)

1974. A car's pulled over. Inside, a congressman. Outside, a stripper, who had run from the vehicle and tried to jump into an estuary. Suspicious! 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. Filth Heads were back another episode if
you can believe it, and let's just get right into
it this time. In the early morning hours of October seventh,
nineteen seventy four, police in Washington, DC pulled over a car.

(00:32):
It had been zigzagging through the night with the headlights off,
and the officers were probably like, Wow, someone's drunk as hell.
Who needs to be breathalyzed when you have eyes? And
maybe they expected this would be your run of the mill, duy,
it was just a chill typically impaired driver, But no,

(00:55):
it was something much more exciting. The first weird thing
that happened was once the vehicle was pulled over, a
woman bolted for the car and tried to throw herself
in the river. And it wasn't really a river. It
was an estuary coming off of the Potomac, barely ten

(01:16):
feet deep. The officers easily heaved her out of the water,
but she tried to bolt again, so she was handcuffed,
and the officers noticed she had two black eyes. Suspicious.
Then they looked inside the car and found a man

(01:37):
with his face cut up and his nose bleeding. And
that guy was a US congressman. Extra suspicious. This would
go on to become one of the most thrilling sex
scandals in American history. And as we know philth List,

(02:06):
there are a lot of them. So that's saying something.
And I know what you guys are thinking. We're only
five episodes into season three and we have yet another
politician getting down and dirty outside of marriage. It's like
it's a requirement to hold office. Is that what you
guys are doing with my tax dollars? Just cheating? God?

(02:30):
What scum? Anyway, cue the theme song. This is American
filth and I'm Gabby Watts. Every week I tell you
a filthy story from American history. This week's episode, the
stripper and the Congressman, the Veda Dada. I got all.

(03:06):
I'm not perfect. I know you guys think that, but
I'm not. I apologize. Anyway, Let's hear some history. Okay,
you're probably like, Gabby, who the heck was that woman?
And why was she trying to jump into a river?
And all I have to say to that is it

(03:28):
was an estuary? Estuary? Am I even saying that correctly?
Hold on estuary, I am saying it right. I just
asked Google, well that lady most people knew her as
Fanny Fox, and soon after this incident she started going
by the title Basin Bombshell. Her god given name was

(03:54):
Annabelle Edith Viagra, and later when she married, she was
annabel Body Stella. So we'll get there, Hold your horses, nay.
Fanny was born in a town outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina,
in nineteen thirty six. She grew up in a very
intellectual family and she wanted to be a doctor. When

(04:17):
she grew up, she enrolled in pre medical college, but
that plan went awry because she got married to a
guy named Eduardo Badistella, and because of that marriage, she
had to quit school to tend to the home and
to her kids. Do you guys know that marriage is
a perfectly good way to ruin your life? Ah. Fanny

(04:42):
said that her marriage was pretty volatile. Her husband was
having affairs, and one night she went after her husband
and lover with a knife and another time tried to
run them over with a car. Also, her piece of
crap husband wasn't bringing in enough money as a jazz
piano player, so in the late nineteen fifty she started

(05:06):
working in entertainment herself. She and her husband sometimes didn't
act together, which brought them on tour to Miami in
nineteen sixty but mostly she got into the biz of stripping.
That's where the money was, and Fanny Fox was born.

(05:30):
Fanny and her family immigrated to the United States in
nineteen sixty three and ended up living in an apartment
near Washington, d C. In Arlington, Virginia. Despite living in
the amazing us of a where all of your dreams
are gonna come true, Fanny's life with her husband was
still quite unfortunate. She said that she tried to commit

(05:53):
suicide twice and also had several abortions. Very grim, but stripping,
she was good at it and was able to support
her family, her husband and her three kids. At the
strip clubs around DC, she was known as the Argentine Firecracker,

(06:14):
and to make more tips, she got some work done.
One newspaper described her as a stripper with a siliconized bust,
a rebobbed nose and surgically tightened stomach. Skin rebobbed. That's
not a nice way to say that she's an adult woman.
It's re roberted to you. I don't know if that

(06:38):
joke works, but I'm leaving it in But in the
nineteen seventies, Fanny Fox's life was about to change. A
couple who lived next door to them was Wilbur Mills
and his wife, Polly, and Wilbur was a US congressman
from Arkansas. He was born down in a small down

(07:05):
outside of Little Rock in nineteen and oh night, I'm
not gonna do the accent anymore. He was born in
nineteen oh nine and by the age of eleven he
was already doing the bookkeeping at his father's general store.
Wilbur went to college, then to Harvard Law School, and
he came home to work at his dad's bank. Yeah,
his dad had a store and his dad had a bank.

(07:31):
Wilbur met his wife Polly at the post office. She
was the post mistress, the mistress of the post They
fell in love, got married without their parents' permission, baddies.
They had a one night honeymoon and then they got
right back to work. That was the Mills family way,
just work, work, work, work, work all the time. The

(07:54):
couple had two daughters, and Wilbur entered civil service versus
a county judge, and then in nineteen thirty eight he
won the election to become a US Congressman. In Congress,
Wilbur served eighteen terms over thirty eight years. He was
very well liked and only had someone run against him

(08:14):
a handful of times. Some people thought he was the
most powerful person in the federal government. He wrote a
lot of the tax code, and he was the man
when it came to knowing about federal tax laws and
the Social Security system. Go off King. One of his
biggest accomplishments was being the chairman of the Ways and

(08:35):
Means Committee. And let me tell you, this man, he
knows the ways and the means, specifically the ways and
means to blow up his life and scandal. So how
did Fanny and Wilburg get entangled? While these two couples
were neighbors and despite the age gap between the two couples,

(08:58):
they kind of hit it off. They're so friendly that
they went out dancing together a few times. But then
Wilbur started going out solo to the Silver Slipper, the
strip club that Fanny Fox worked at, and at some
point they started blinking. During the time he met Fanny,

(09:22):
Wilbur was sixty four and she was thirty seven, and
they were they're pretty different, you know. One magazine described
her as five feet eight, one hundred and eighteen, well
turned pounds, brown eyes, brown hair, with a soft Spanish accent,
and olive skinned. Wilbur, on the other hand, was quote
a stocky, bifocaled, gravel voiced lawyer of middling height and

(09:47):
iron gray hair. But I get it. I see what
she saw on him. He had buy focals. That means
that man could buy focus on you and your needs.
That's right, focus on you twice. That means as for
Wilbur going out to the strip club Booze In have

(10:09):
an affair, this seemed totally out of character for him.
A reporter asked some of Wilbur's friends and colleagues what
they think happened, and one of his friends said the
congressman had a miserable home life. He drowned himself in
work twenty hours a day. A man can repress himself

(10:30):
and remain a spartan only for so long. When all
Wilbur finally broke, he broke big be right back after
these do thing advertisements. In an article about Wilbur mills

(10:50):
In at Times, it described him as the most tightly
buttoned up man in Congress, but the buttons popped off
during the early morning hours of October seventh, nineteen seventy four. Honestly,
that's some pretty incredible shade to this man. So this

(11:11):
brings us to that night when DC police pulled over
that vehicle filled with drunk people, including Wilbur and Fanny,
and then Fanny jumped out of the car and tried
to dive into a river, and by river, I mean estuary.
The night was chaotic, but the officers didn't arrest anyone.

(11:32):
They drove Wilbur and the other people in the car
home and then took Fanny to the hospital because of
her black eyes. And it might have all been fine,
they might have gotten away with it. But unfortunately where
they were pulled over, there just happened to be a
reporter with a camera crew, those sneaky, sneaky reporters. The

(11:58):
next day, the expose was all over town that a
congressman was caught with some friends and a stripper in
a car and they were intoxicated, and then the stripper
tried to escape by throwing herself in a river, and
by river, I mean estuary. This was scandalous, and then

(12:20):
even more scandalous about a month after this, incident, Wilbur
showed up at a venue Fanny Fox was performing at
in Boston. He was drunk and got on stage with
her and made an incomprehensible speech, what the hell, Wilbur.
This was basically the nail in the coffin to Wilbur

(12:40):
Mills congressional career. In the month between these two incidents,
Wilbur barely won an election. Luckily he was running against
a foul opponent, a woman Yuck. Because of the scandal,

(13:01):
he had to resign as chairman of the Ways and
Means Committee because he no longer had the ways and
means of being a respectable member of Congress. He also
checked into an alcoholic treatment center, and when his next
term came up, he didn't run. His political career was over.

(13:24):
But while Wilbur was doomed, this scandal made Fanny Fox
pop off, and she started making a pretty penny. Everybody
wanted to see the woman responsible for the downfall of
an old ass congressman at her usual clubs. She upped

(13:47):
her weekly fee from five hundred a week to thirty
five hundred, and her first big gig was in Orlando,
and for two weeks she charged thirty thousand dollars. She
didn't even finish the gig because in her first week
there she got charged for indecent exposure in Florida. She
had taken off all her clothes, which you can't do that.

(14:09):
You got to keep some on. Okay, it's Florida, we
gotta be modest. The media was also in a frenzy.
They wanted to know what happened, and in the months
after the incident, Fanny Fox kept claiming that she and
Wilburt were just friends. She's like, I don't know why
people would think we were having an affair. That's crazy.

(14:32):
He's just my neighbor. And when reporters asked her why
she jumped into the estuary, she was like, Oh, I
did that because I was trying to protect my good
friend's reputation. You see, he's a congressman. I didn't think
it would be nice if people saw me and him
a stripper and him. You know, I'm just being nice

(14:52):
to my friend. Manan was buying this. A month after
all this happened, Fanny Fox appeared on the daytime talk
television show The Mike Douglas Show, and her we're just
friend's defense sounded pretty preposterous, and that was made super

(15:13):
clear by the other guest on the show that day,
Richard Prior, the comedian, was incredulous the whole time. Like
when she was asked about that night when they got
pulled over, Fanny was like, I was the only one intoxicated,
and the only reason was because I had the flu
and was on medication. Sure, yeah, nobody else was drunk

(15:38):
for sure. Then Fanny said that Wilbur Mills is a
very friendly person, and Richard Pryor, who'd been cackling the
whole time, was like, yeah, he is. Then Mike Douglas
was like, well, what about Wilbur's injuries? He had scratches
on his face and was bleeding, and Fanny was like,
I turned around and hit his glasses by accident, And

(16:01):
then Richard Pryor was like, yeah, and you tripped into
the lake. Also, everyone calmed down. We all know it's
an estuary. Don't get out at Richard Pryor. He maybe
didn't have all the information. Fanny was really annoyed after
this TV appearance. She was like, it sounded like Richard
Pryor didn't believe me, and I know, how dare he

(16:25):
not believe her. How dare he not trust a woman,
a woman who was drinking cold medicine. That's why she
was drunk. Also, you know, never mind the fact that
in the weeks after the incident, Fanny and her husband
finalized their divorce. Yeah, that had nothing to do with Wilburg,
nothing at all. She was like, we were planning to

(16:45):
get divorced for completely different reasons. This was her tune
for a while. She's like, we're just friends. But still
she was capitalizing on all that publicity. She went on
an exotic dancing East Coast tour and made multiple television appearances.

(17:06):
She then expanded her operation, playing night clubs across the
country and getting gigs in Vegas. And Fanny well, she
wasn't going to limit herself to just exotic advancing. Oh no,
she was a big deal now, a cultural icon. She
was gonna go multi media. She decided to write a

(17:28):
tell all book with the help of a ghostwriter, called
The Stripper and the Congressman, or, as one newspaper called it,
a swim and tell memoir, And in the book, Fanny
Fox changed her tune. She admitted to many of the

(17:48):
rumors about her and Wilbur she was like, yeah, he
was my lover. We boinked, we were in love. I
was about to leave my husband and he was going
to leave his wife, and we were gonna have a
beautiful life together. That crusty old man was great to me.
In the book, Fanny said that she and Wilburt actually

(18:10):
first met when he came to her strip club. This
was in June nineteen seventy three. She's like, yeah, we
were neighbors, but that's where I met him. Allegedly, the
night she met him, Wilbur was quote flying high aka
quite fucked up, quote feeling no pain. That night he
spent eleven hundred dollars on champagne, which adjusted for inflation today,

(18:33):
would be like eight thousand dollars, and while he was there,
his friend introduced him to Fanny. Fanny said that Wilbert
at first lied about his age. She was like, I'm
fifty five, so spry, so young, and he also claimed
that he was separated from his wife. Later, they went
to his apartment. I guess Polly was out of town

(18:54):
or something. They had vodka shots, and Wilbur finally confessed
he was like, actually, I'm not a spry fifty five
year old. I'm actually sixty five and very much still
married to my wife, but she's here's a bitch and
makes me miserable. After about eight months of this, Fanny
said they were in love, and she claimed that Wilbur

(19:14):
had promised to divorce his wife Polly numerous times. At
some point, Polly found out about the affair, and despite that,
Fanny said the three of them were really good friends
and would play cards together. One day, Polly asked her,
why would you fool around with my husband. You are
a young married woman. Wilbur is too old for you.

(19:38):
When he drinks, Wilbur as irresponsible. He will say anything.
I'm telling you now, I will never give him a divorce.
You are wasting your time. Fanny believed that Wilbur was
absolutely miserable with Polly and that's why he drank, and
despite Polly's warning and her knowledge of the affair, they

(20:00):
continued on. Wilbur and Fanny travel to Antigua in the
Caribbean wa one month, where she said they did a
mock wedding ceremony, and then they even vacation together in Arkansas.
While they were there, she claimed that they conceived a child,
but When they told Wilbur's evil wife Polly about the pregnancy,

(20:22):
Fanny said quote she advised us not to go through
with it. Wilbur said, I should have the child, but
I had an abortion instead. Now I very much regret it.
After the affair was exposed to the public, Fanny said
she and Wilbur still saw each other occasionally, and she

(20:43):
still held out hope that they'd get married someday. She said,
what I am sad about is mister Mills. He has
been stripped of his power. I know much of it
is my fault, and I am worried about his future.
I still love him very much, and even though we
have gone our separate ways, if he were to ask
me to drop everything and marry him, I would do

(21:05):
it at once. He is the one in my life
who brought out the best in me. The difference in
our ages that does not mean very much to me.
But over the months over the next year, they started
seeing each other even less. She called his office every
other day to talk to his secretary to see how

(21:27):
he was doing. She made ultimatums like if he didn't
leave his wife by the time she was forty, she
was going to move back to Argentina. When she was
interviewed about her book. Fanny was always extremely nice about Wilbur.
She was awed by his intelligence, his amount of care,

(21:49):
remember the bifocals, and his love for her. But here's
my question. Remember when she jumped out of the car
diving into the estuary. She had two black eyes and
Wilbur had scratches on his face from her axe hitting
his glasses. So I think it's pretty fair to say

(22:11):
that their relationship wasn't great. She was making it seem
very picture perfect, but clearly they had fought. He had
hit her, she had hit him. Also, Wilbur was an alcoholic,
which Fanny never admitted. She was like, yeah, he likes alcohol,
but I think he's fine. A lot of denial was happening.

(22:39):
Wilbur Mills never talked about this affair publicly. I imagine
Polly was like, you better shut your mouth. But Fanny,
she kept getting more and more successful with her book,
The Stripper and the Congressman. She kept touring the country,
not just as an entertainer but also as an esteemed author.

(23:00):
She was bringing in thousands of dollars at each stop,
but stripping writing, entertaining well Fanny Fox didn't stop there.
She became a movie star, and by movie star, I
mean she played herself in a couple of movies. She
was in this one movie, a western called Posse from Heaven,

(23:23):
which one reviewer said, I've seen bad movies from the seventies,
but this one is in a league of its own.
That probably means it's very entertaining. In it, Fanny plays
herself as a stripper guardian angel to a cowboy, and
the movie gave a not at all subtle nod to
Wilbur the former Ways and Means Committee chair, because the

(23:46):
movie was billed as Posse from Heaven. She had the
ways and he had the means. At this point, Fanny
Fox was rich. Her manager Dan Montgomery said, I've got
Fanny fixed with at least two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars worth of contracts over the next year. With all

(24:11):
this money coming in, Fanny was able to buy a
seventeen room mansion for her and her now teenage kids
in Westport, Connecticut. But Fanny was getting tired of performing.
She'd been a stripper for more than twenty years. She
wanted to settle down, and she wanted to be with Wilbur,

(24:32):
but she didn't think society would ever accept them and
Wilbur Well, he never did get divorced. After leaving Congress,
he continued working in Washington, d c. For a couple decades,
and then moved back to Arkansas. There he put a
lot of money into developing an alcoholism treatment center. Fanny

(24:57):
eventually moved on. She married her manager. They had a daughter,
and then divorced five years later. After that, Fanny moved
to Florida. She was done with the rigmarole of entertainment life.
She went back to school, got a degree in communications
and then a master's in marine science. One of her

(25:19):
kids was like, yeah, we don't know why she got
these degrees, but we're proud of her. He also said
that she became a scuba diving master and did some
underwater filming in Mexico. I. And this makes sense though,
after the press like airs all of your dirty laundry,
and also you spend years performing for mostly gross men,
you deserve to do whatever the heck you want, and

(25:41):
if that's to study marine biology, I mean, heck, yeah,
that's great. Wilbrim Mills died in nineteen ninety two and
Fanny Fox died thirty years later in twenty twenty one,
at the age of eighty four. They never did get together.

(26:03):
Every episode of American felt a lesson, And I think
the lesson here is something that I've reiterated on this
show again and again even already this season, which is
men aren't gonna divorce their wives for you. They're not
gonna do it. They're too lazy. And also, they do
divorce their wife for you, they're then gonna divorce you

(26:24):
for somebody else. So fuck these men. You don't need them.
Girl power cue the credits. American Field is a production
of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. This episode was
written by me Gabby Watts. Our theme song is by
Jesse and Eiswanger. Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley,

(26:48):
and Brandon Barr. You can follow along with the show
on Instagram at American Field pod, or you can follow
me on my Instagram at g A H H H
B B I E. W Atts. Please make sure to
like and subscribe to the show and tell of your
friends and enemies about it, and I will talk at
you guys next week. Happy October, Bye ya. School of humans,