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Only a month after President Eisenhower’s inauguration, legendary beauty maven Elizabeth Arden had a backhanded compliment waiting for first lady Mamie Eisenhower — but also a promise to do her “special hair-do … perfectly” from then on.
“When you first returned from Paris I thought your hair looked really beautiful, but it did not seem quite the same in subsequent photographs,” Arden wrote to Mrs. Eisenhower in February 1953. Ouch.
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But Arden then goes on to tell the first lady that she’s commissioned sketches of her hair style “and I am asking the young woman who does your hair to study it very carefully … and practice, practice, practice!”
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The letter is reprinted, along with an accompanying essay, in the forthcoming “Dear First Lady: Letters to the White House,” a compendium of letters from the National Archives and Library of Congress.
Other letters include a missive from Betty Ford (the wife of Tennessee Ernie Ford) to first lady Betty Ford about how people keep confusing them. “One minute I am fawned upon and the next … I am hauled off to the managers’ office to expose all my damned credit cards,” Betty No. 2 writes.
The Nixon daughters’ “happy birthday” message to Mrs. Eisenhower in crayon is reproduced, as is a letter from Marge Simpson to Barbara Bush. When Mrs. Bush referred to “The Simpsons” as the “dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” Marge retorted via letter: “Ma’am, if we’re the dumbest thing you’ve ever saw, Washington must be a good deal different from what they teach me at the current events group at the church.”
In her foreword, Helen Thomas, who has covered nine first ladies, reveals that her famous journalistic ethics may not have always been so sacrosanct. She tells how on a cross-country trip, Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary, Liz Carpenter, would “haul out the champagne and fried chicken for the hungry press corps. That endeared Lady Bird and Liz to us, I’ll admit.”
On Hillary Clinton, Thomas observes that “she had to attend the pro forma political and press dinners, but none of this was her cup of tea.”