Fanne Foxe. Ms. Foxe was also known as “the Argentine Firecracker”, though she became most famous as the woman who jumped out of Wilbur Mills’s car.
The first whiff of trouble broke about 2 a.m. on Oct. 7, 1974, when two United States Park Service police officers spotted Mr. Mills’s car speeding with lights off near the Jefferson Memorial and pulled it over. Apparently panicking, Ms. Foxe bolted from the car and, yelling in English and Spanish, tried to escape by jumping into the Tidal Basin, a Potomac estuary with an average depth of 10 feet.
The officers pulled her out, handcuffed her when she tried to jump in again and returned her to the car, where they found Mr. Mills and several other occupants intoxicated. Mr. Mills was bleeding from his nose and facial scratches, and Ms. Foxe had two black eyes. An officer drove her to a hospital and the others to their homes.
The incident might have gone unnoticed, but a television cameraman came upon the scene and recorded it. The police filed no charges, and Mr. Mills issued a statement that cast events in an innocent light. But within days the outlines of a political sex scandal began to emerge. Mr. Mills, facing voters in November, returned home to campaign and was narrowly re-elected to his 19th term.
But under withering publicity detailing his alcoholism and peccadilloes with Ms. Foxe, including an impromptu appearance at a Boston burlesque stage where she was performing, Mr. Mills checked into an alcoholic-treatment center, resigned as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and did not run for re-election in 1976, ending a 38-year congressional career.
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Ms. Foxe appeared on television talk shows and in Las Vegas nightclubs, was featured in Playboy magazine in 1976 and 1977 and starred in several movies as herself, including “Posse From Heaven” (1975), about a stripper who becomes a guardian angel to a cowboy, and “This Is America” (1977), a documentary featuring car crashes and a nude beauty contest.
Her 180-page paperback, “The Stripper and the Congressman” (1975, with Yvonne Dunleavy), detailed an affair that began after she and her Argentine husband, Edwardo Battistella, met Mr. Mills and his wife, Polly Mills, in their building in 1973. The couples became friends and went dancing together.
Then, the book said, Mr. Mills began visiting the Silver Slipper often. He took Ms. Foxe on a three-week junket to Antigua and promised to marry her if he could get a divorce. Ms. Foxe’s husband, with whom she had three children, divorced her just before the affair was publicly disclosed. Mr. Mills, as a recovered alcoholic who counseled other alcoholics, remained married to his wife until his death, at 82, in 1992.
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Ms. Montgomery moved to St. Petersburg, Fla., in the late 1980s, and undertook a series of challenging late-in-life academic pursuits. She earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Tampa in 1995 and a master’s in marine science (in 2001) and a master’s in business administration (2004) from the University of South Florida, all with magna cum laude honors.
“I’m not sure what her motivation was, but we were all very proud of her accomplishments,” Alex Montgomery said of his mother in a 2019 interview for this obituary. “She was a very intelligent woman. Remarkable. She also became a scuba-diving master at the University of South Florida and went to Cozumel, Mexico, to do some underwater filming.”
WP, and since the paper is basically unreadable without a subscription, here’s a slightly less unreadable version from archive.is.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, beat poet and owner of the City Lights Bookstore.