An Argentine stripper whose stage name became well known to Arkansans in the 1970s has died.
Fanne Foxe was intimately linked to the downfall of one of the state's most powerful political figures of the 20th century -- Congressman Wilbur Mills.
The Washington Post and The New York Times reported Wednesday that Foxe died Feb. 10 at the age of 84.
In 1974, Annabel Battistella, 38, was a striptease dancer in Washington, D.C., who went by the name Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker.
About 2 a.m. Oct. 7, 1974, U.S. Park Police pulled over a speeding limousine that had no headlights on near the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.
A female passenger in an evening gown ran from the car and wound up in the Tidal Basin, a 107-acre, 10-foot-deep estuary that is part of West Potomac Park.
Articles from the Post and Times differ on whether she "leaped headfirst," "plunged" or just plain "waded" into the Tidal Basin.
In any event, she wound up in the water.
The splash secured a place in the annals of political scandal for Battistella (later Annabel Montgomery).
Standing near the car, drunk and bleeding, was Mills, 65, chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee.
Mills, a Democrat, was widely regarded as the most powerful man in government after the president.
He was bleeding from his nose and facial scratches, and Foxe had two black eyes, according to the Times' article.
"The incident might have gone unnoticed, but a television cameraman came upon the scene and recorded it," according to the Times. "The police filed no charges, and Mills issued a statement that cast events in an innocent light. But within days the outlines of a political sex scandal began to emerge."
The Mills incident broke almost two months after President Richard Nixon resigned because of the Watergate scandal.
"Until Watergate, the media had separated largely politicians' personal lives from their professional lives, their public responsibility from their personal or private peccadilloes," said Janine Parry, a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Watergate changed that, but Mills won reelection with 59% of the vote in November 1974, a month after the Tidal Basin incident, according to the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
"I believe a good many of his constituents just shrugged it off, something like 'he may be a drunk, but he was our drunk,'" said Jeannie Whayne, UA professor of history.
Mills was an Arkansas wunderkind.
Born May 24, 1909, in Kensett (White County), he earned a bachelor's degree from Hendrix College and a law degree from Harvard University. Back home in Arkansas, he worked as an attorney and managed the Bank of Kensett and the A.P. Mills general store in Kensett, according to the encyclopedia. In 1934, White County voters made him the youngest county judge in the state.
At 29, Mills became at the time the youngest person ever elected to Congress, according to the encyclopedia. In 1958, he was the youngest person, at 49, to become chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
In Congress, Mills was known as the architect for Medicare, interstate highways, Social Security, tax reform and many other policies.
"Mr. Mills's prestige had derived not only from his reputation for keen intellect and intense scrutiny to detail but from the then-potent seniority system, which granted enormous power to committee chairmen, especially to the chairman of the committee that held the purse strings," according to Mills' obituary in the Times. He died in 1992.
As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Mills had the privilege of naming members of his party to their committee assignments on all other House committees.
That gave Mills "sheer raw power," former U.S. Sen. David Pryor told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 2010.
"Planes would fly into the Little Rock airport by the droves and they would traipse to Kensett, Ark., and sit on his porch or in his kitchen and make their case to the chairman about their committee assignments," Pryor said.
But the Tidal Basin incident altered Mills' course.
"Under withering publicity detailing his alcoholism and peccadilloes with Foxe, including an impromptu appearance at a Boston burlesque stage where she was performing, Mills checked into an alcoholic-treatment center, resigned as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and did not run for reelection in 1976, ending a 38-year congressional career," according to the Times.
Before he died at the age of 82, Mills became active in raising money for the treatment of alcoholism.
The Mills scandal was so riveting, in part, because of how far he fell.
Six years before the Tidal Basin incident, the Times had dubbed Mills "the most important man on Capitol Hill."
"I think it's telling that that kind of incident used to be career-ending," Parry said.
"I think it would be fair to say that no chair -- and certainly no Arkansan -- after Mills wields the sort of undivided power he'd exercised over Ways and Means," said Patrick George Williams, a UA history professor.
Annabel Montgomery died of natural causes, according to a paid post in the Tampa Bay Times.
"She is the proud recipient of numerous degrees and awards including a B.S. in communications from the University of Tampa where she was Phi Beta Kappa," according to the obituary. "She also earned two master's degrees from The University of South Florida, one in marine science and one in business administration."
She is survived by three children and seven grandchildren.
Mills' name lives on in Arkansas. Things named for Mills include Wilbur D. Mills University Studies High School in Pulaski County, the Wilbur D. Mills Social Sciences Building at Hendrix College, the Wilbur D. Mills Freeway (Interstate 630) in Little Rock, and the Wilbur D. Mills Lock and Dam on the Arkansas River.