Mrs. L, as many called her, didn't need a motto, but she had one, embroidered on a sofa pillow: "If you haven't got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me." In a city where gossip is currency, she was rarely alone.

She has been gone since 1980, when she died at 96, having been center stage in Washington since her father, Theodore Roosevelt, followed the slain William McKinley to the White House in 1901. The event filled Alice with "utter rapture."

But Longworth is having an active afterlife in the memoirs and biographies of other people. She is mentioned 10 times in "Personal History," the memoirs of Katharine Graham, the former publisher of the Washington Post. She appears 64 times in Carl Sferrazza Anthony's 1998 biography of first lady Florence Harding, cited in the index under such categories as "political informant," "spitefulness of," "unconventional behavior of," "extramarital affair of" and "WH (Warren Harding) disparaged by."

Longworth -- whose husband, Nicholas Longworth, was a Republican speaker of the House -- appears an additional 34 times in Anthony's two-volume history of America's first ladies, weaving in and out of one administration after another.

Graham recalled her mother, Agnes Meyer, as "always ambivalent about Mrs. Longworth," despairing at her "brilliant but sterile mind."

"After one party they both attended early in 1920, my mother described Alice as having been in a very carnal sort of mood," Graham wrote. "She ate three chops, told shady stories and finally sang in a deep bass voice: Nobody cultivates me, I'm wild, I'm wild."

By the standards of Washington early in the 20th century, Alice Roosevelt had been wild indeed. Her father, the president, said famously that he could manage the government or manage Alice -- but couldn't possibly do both at once.

Attracting enormous publicity, she smoked, drove her own car, plunged fully clothed into a swimming pool, placed a bet at a race track, was seen in public wearing a boa constrictor around her neck, set off firecrackers and shot at telegraph poles from a train; she was universally dubbed "Princess Alice" after she christened the yacht of Kaiser Wilhelm's brother.

"In the Progressive Era there was no star like the princess," Carl Anthony writes. "She became an idol to women around the world ... Shortly an 'Alice industry' was set in motion. When it was discovered that a particular gray-blue was her favorite color, 'Alice blue' was born ... Sheet music for the hit song 'Alice Blue Gown' became impossible to get because it kept selling out."

Longworth's East Room wedding to the Republican lawmaker was a spectacular affair. The marriage itself was decidedly sour, but it did nothing to dampen her style.

When her father was succeeded in the presidency by William Howard Taft she planted a voodoo doll of Nellie Taft, the new first lady, on the White House lawn. She honed an impersonation of the first lady in which she mocked her "hippopotamus face" and "Cin-cin-nasty" accent. Years later, Longworth added to her repertoire an impersonation of her cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she had tormented since youth.

A congressman's wife, describing Alice at a White House party in 1911, said she "held the very scant skirt quite high, and when the band played, kicked about and moved her body sinuously like a shining leopard cat." At a society ball about that time she bounced to the Turkey Trot while blowing rhythmic puffs of cigarette smoke, causing some to liken her to a rocketing locomotive.

Five, six and seven decades later, Longworth was, in her words, "an ambulatory Washington monument," still parading opinions. The stories are still being told, in print and at Washington parties. She forbade Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis., to call her by her first name, saying the trash man had that privilege but he didn't. She adopted a trademarked wide-brimmed hat and told President Lyndon Johnson she wore it so he couldn't get close enough to kiss her.

She had known every president since her father took her to the White House at age 6 to meet Benjamin Harrison. Like many of Harrison's successors, he left her unimpressed. "He was like a rather solemn bearded gnome," she recalled.
salon.com | June 7, 1999

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

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