STRIPPER EXPOSED D.C. POLITICAL SEX SCANDAL

Fanne Foxe, the stripper known as the “Argentine Firecracker” and who leaped from the limousine of U.S. Rep. Wilbur D. Mills and plunged into the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C., after a night of drinking, exposing one of the biggest political sex scandals of the 1970s, died Feb. 10. She was 84.

Her death was announced in a paid notice in The Tampa Bay Times in Florida. It did not say where she died or give a cause.

Until the Tidal Basin episode, Mills had been one of the most powerful members of Congress, an 18-term Arkansas Democrat who chaired the Ways and Means Committee and wrote major tax legislation. He had flirted with a bid for the presidency and a Supreme Court seat and, at 65, seemed a model of stability, a married father and grandfather in the twilight of a distinguished career.

But for more than a year he had been drinking heavily and was involved in a secret affair with Foxe, 38, a mother of three whose real name was Annabel Battistella. She was a $500-a-week performer at the Silver Slipper, a club in Washington. Until her recent divorce, she and her husband had lived in an Arlington, Va., apartment building where Mills and his wife resided.

The first whiff of trouble broke about 2 a.m. on Oct. 7, 1974, when two U.S. Park Service police officers spotted Mills’ car speeding with lights off near the Jefferson Memorial and pulled it over. Apparently panicking, 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 Mills and several other occupants intoxicated. Mills was bleeding from his nose and facial scratches, and 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 Mills issued a statement that cast events in an innocent light. But within days the outlines of a political sex scandal began to emerge. Mills, facing voters in November, returned home to campaign and was narrowly reelected to his 19th term.

But under withering publicity detailing his alcoholism and peccadilloes with Foxe, 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.