The White House: Three-Ring Wedding

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For her parents, at least, the marriage of Maria Hester Monroe was a huge success. That first wedding of a U.S. President’s daughter in 1820 was confined so closely to the family that the ceremony was attended by only 42 guests and reported by the Washington press in 34 words. Subsequent White House brides from Elizabeth Tyler in 1842 to “Princess” Alice Roosevelt-who envisaged a “comparatively quiet family affair” and wound up with 1,000 guests in 1906—have sought with diminishing success to elude the tidal wave of publicity that inevitably engulfs a First Family wedding.

Luci Baines Johnson proved no exception. “I only want,” she said last month, “as personal a wedding as possible in the circumstances in which I find myself.” In reality, Luci’s wedding to Patrick Nugent this week will be a semimonarchical event, a marital marathon to which, as Comedienne Edie Adams quips, “nobody is invited except the immediate country.” It could hardly be otherwise in an age of ubiquitous journalistic surveillance and omnivorous curiosity about the day-to-day doings at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And Lyndon Johnson has gone farther than most Presidents to share his progeny, pets, predilections and possessions with the nation at large.

For her part, if only by resolving to have the ceremony performed in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception—largest Roman Catholic Church in the U.S.—the President’s younger daughter opted automatically for pomp above privacy. No one has ever been married before in the great hilltop edifice in northeast Washington, with its mosaic domes, 30 satellite chapels and ornate, still-incomplete interior that has had to be cleared of scaffolding for the occasion. Actually, it is normal Catholic practice for a girl to be married in her own parish church; Luci’s happens to be St. Matthew’s Cathedral, which is only six blocks from the White House and would thus have limited the wedding party’s public exposure. (One rationale for not using St. Matthew’s, of course, is that it would have evoked memories of John Kennedy’s funeral.) Six of the daughters of Presidents who have become brides said their vows in the White House itself, while the seventh, F.D.R.’s Anna, was married inconspicuously in New York.

Absent Brother. There will be nothing inconspicuous about the event starting at 11 a.m. Saturday, when the National Shrine’s 56-bell carillon thunders into a window-rattling medley of works by Handel, Bach, Purcell and a new composition by Dutch-born Johan Franco. During the hour-long tintinnabulation, the principals and their guests will arrive under the unblinking scrutiny of TV. Inside—mercifully beyond reach of electronic peeping—the company and a pool of newsmen will see the father of the bride decked out in the formal regalia, morning coat and striped trousers, that he refused to don for the presidential inauguration in 1965. While the organist plays Paraphrase on a Trumpet Tune by Henry Purcell, the wedding party—mostly young friends and schoolmates of the bride and groom—will shepherd its charge up a 400-ft. marble aisle to a chancel large enough to accommodate a concourse of cardinals. The bride’s attendants will wear pink gowns; the groomsmen will be attired in cutaways rented at $11 each. Luci and Pat, having climbed 50 steps from the street, will be clearly—if minutely —visible to all as they stand at the elevated altar.

To the accompaniment of a 100-voice choir formed especially for the occasion, Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle will officiate at the Nuptial Mass, assisted by two priests: William Kaifer, who was Luci’s chaplain while she attended the Georgetown University School of Nursing, and John Kuzinskas of Chicago, who married the bridegroom’s elder brother Gerard, now a Marine lieutenant in Viet Nam. Gerard will be best man in absentia; his father, Gerard Sr., will stand proxy for him. And so, after a ceremony of 60 minutes, Miss Luci Baines Johnson of the White House and Johnson City, Texas, will become the lawful wedded wife of Mr. Patrick John Nugent of Waukegan, Ill., a town hitherto famed mostly for the fact that it was the birthplace of Jack Benny.

Honeymoon àTrois. Before the last anthem dies, official Washington will be preoccupied with the massive logistical feat of transporting the newly conjoined Nugents, relatives, friends and selected luminaries over 3.6 miles of public roads to the White House. Greeted by more reporters and television cameras, serenaded by the U.S. Marine Corps Band and Peter Duchin’s dance orchestra, the company will sip domestic champagne, nibble at a sumptuous buffet, and attack a 300-lb., 8-ft. cake before Luci, Pat and her ever-present Secret Service escort go off on a honeymoon à trois.

It will be a three-ring affair in every sense. Pat will wear one ring, but Luci will get two diamond-studded bands, one to go on each side of her engagement ring. Instead of one bridal bouquet there will be two, one for Luci to throw and one for her to lay—at her request—at the foot of a statue of St. Agatha, a patron saint of nurses. Lady Bird Johnson, who was married on the day she gave her first unequivocal yes, by a pastor she had never met, with a $2.50 ring hastily bought at Sears, Roebuck, says a touch wistfully: “The wedding day will be something beautiful to remember, and I want Luci to have it.”

Code Name Venus. Toward this end, the White House has more and more resembled a strategic command post as the prenuptial months shortened into weeks, the weeks into days. Mother and bride pored endlessly over lists of names before culling a roster of 700-plus guests. Myriad flowers were planted and nurtured, a raft of invitations elegantly addressed by three staff calligraphers. Dresses had to be selected for the bride and her attendants, a trousseau acquired, security arrangements settled and—after a parade of cardboard-and-frosting mock-up models worthy of changeover season in Detroit—the wedding cake approved and confected.

The result may be Texan-presidential in scale, but in detail the wedding bears all the diverse and diverting hallmarks of Luci Johnson. The bride-to-be is at once gay and fey and deeply religious. She displays Johnson traits in abundance: she is strong-willed and sensitive, voluble and introspective, fiercely loyal to her family yet irrepressibly independent. Lady Bird describes her younger daughter as both a “sprite” and a “philosopher.” Lyndon Johnson once said: “I have known this little ruler all her life. She entered the world with a commanding voice and has been taking over ever since.” Luci, who calls herself a “theatrical person” and a “romantic,” says mysteriously: “I am a blue-eyed daughter in a brown-eyed family.” She elaborates: “I know I’m very different from the rest of my family. My interests are not the same and my physical appearance is not the same. Sometimes I think I scare them.”

The eyes that set her apart are a deep and striking blue. Endowed as well with lustrous black hair, flashing smile and a milkmaid’s complexion, Luci is undeniably comely—more so than most of her photographs indicate. Not entirely by accident, the Secret Service code name for her is Venus; Lynda, more studious and serious, is Velvet; Lady Bird is Victoria.

Muddling Through. As a girl, Luci often seemed the victim of a younger-sibling complex, which she assuaged with the usual attention-getting gambits of childhood and adolescence. It was not a conventional upbringing for either Luci or her older sister Lynda Bird, now 22, because of frequent separations from their parents. Throughout the “deprivileged” years, as the sisters call them, Father was in perpetual political motion in Washington and Texas while Mother had the family interests to mind; until Luci was eleven, even her school year was divided between Austin and Washington. Most summers she went to camp in Texas. Always striving to be grown up, always “eleven going on 16,” as a contemporary puts it, she changed the y in her first name to i for no apparent reason years ago, got mediocre grades in school until a sight problem was discovered and treated, muddled capriciously through the difficult years.

If she had her foibles, if she played the piano loudly while Mother was trying to give an interview, if she teased photographers hip-deep into the Atlantic City surf in order to take her picture, Luci’s capers never became a public problem. Nellie Grant’s flirtations were so well noted that her mother packed her off to Europe at 16—only to have Nellie return with a dandified English worshiper in tow. Alice Roosevelt (who will attend this week’s wedding) scandalized Washington 60 years ago by smoking cigarettes in public and riding horseback in breeches.

Fun Man. Pudgy and sometimes petulant as a bobbysoxer, Luci has evolved into a slim, articulate, engaging girl-woman who has been able to weather the limelight with considerable poise and—it seems to some—greater relish than her pleas for privacy would suggest. The impression she conveys obviously concerns her. Though she only turned 19 on July 2, she abhors the stereotype of the teen-age marriage, points out bravely that her own and Pat’s ages average out to 21. On this score her mother, who was 21 and a college graduate before she married, says reassuringly: “I think a year of planning it and a year of being sure about it is a very reasonable approach. Luci is a very feminine, domestic sort of girl for whom this will be right.”

Luci has also been around a bit. She campaigned with her parents in 26 states in 1964 and, despite the lisp she cannot always control, learned to deliver pleasant, spontaneous little talks. During the last academic year she buckled down earnestly to her nursing studies. Pat calls her “much more mature than other girls her age.” To Luci, her sober, self-possessed fiancé is “a gentle man, a kind man, a fun man.” And, she vows, “he will always have the upper hand of me.”

In her choice of a husband, Luci breaks another White House tradition. Without exception, her seven predecessors as White House brides took husbands who were mature, professionally established, wealthy, patrician, or all four.* By contrast, Pat, 23, has a modest background and an uncharted future. His parents, Gerard and Tillie Nugent, have lived for 25 years in a small orange bungalow with fake-brick siding in a blue-collar Waukegan neighborhood. Gerard Nugent, district sales manager for a mutual-fund distributor, is of Irish descent. Mrs. Nugent’s antecedents are Lithuanian. They sent their tall, athletic son to parochial grammar and prep schools and then to Jesuit Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he graduated with a B average in history. He earned pocket money by working as a parking-lot attendant and tour guide at the Miller High Life brewery. At school his friends called him “Paddy” or “Nuge.” One Marquette professor remembers him as “independent, not one of the herd, a take-charge guy.”

Norn de Prom. In Milwaukee, Pat knew Beth Jenkins, a close friend of Luci’s and daughter of former White House Aide Walter Jenkins. When Beth arranged an expedition to Washington in June 1965 to help celebrate Luci’s graduation from National Cathedral School, Pat went along. Beth also suggested that Luci be Pat’s date at the Marquette senior prom. Freshly unpinned from her most recent steady boy friend, Luci went to Milwaukee with her Secret Service escort, an outrageous blond wig, and a nom de prom (Amy Nunn) to assure privacy. The escapade was successful on all counts —so much so that she invited Pat to go back to Washington to attend her formal acceptance into the Catholic Church on her 18th birthday.

It was to be Luci Johnson’s first serious exposure to the pitfalls of being a President’s daughter. Having already been christened in the Episcopal Church, she did not, strictly speaking, need a second baptism at the time of her conversion. Luci nonetheless requested and received the sacrament, prompting public complaint that she had gratuitously slighted the Episcopal Church and ecumenical spirit.

Aseptic Good Looks. Though the flurry was short-lived and Luci obviously had no intention of offending her mother’s denomination, she was shaken by the outcry. Last month, in the White House solarium that has served her as study, sanctuary, party room and private meeting place with Pat—it had previously been Caroline Kennedy’s nursery-schoolroom—Luci sat on a well-broken-in sofa, tucked her legs beneath her, and allowed that the baptismal storm had after all wafted Pat her way. “I didn’t know what to do,” she explained. “I was frightened. Lynda and my mother were away. So Pat said: ‘I just can’t go home and leave you here by yourself. It just isn’t fair. I’m going to get myself a job and an apartment.'”

Though Washington is besieged each summer by youngsters in search of work, Pat quickly whistled up a job on the staff of the District of Columbia Advisory Committee on Higher Education. “So I went out with him every night,” she recalled, “and it just stayed that way.” They went paddle-boating, with a Secret Service agent paddling in their wake. They had picnics along the Potomac, flew up to New York to see the World’s Fair and a Broadway show. They zipped around Washington in Luci’s green Sting Ray convertible for a while, but this nettled Pat’s pride; he borrowed his father’s 1963 Plymouth until he bought his own car. Yet it was several weeks before Washington gossips realized that Students Jack Olsen and Paul Betz, Luci’s previous best beaux, had a successor. The reason for the recognition lapse was simply that her new escort, with his aseptic, athletic good looks, short blond hair and modest mien, resembled any number of the Secret Service agents in Luci’s orbit.

Algernon & Nellie. Eventually, of course, newsmen caught on, but Luci’s new steady rated little attention from the press until October. At First Friday Mass, Pat proposed and was accepted. Luci received a ring made from Pat’s Alpha Kappa Psi fraternity pin, which she has never worn in public. By the end of the month, headlines predicting their marriage bounced around the world. The President was at the L.B.J. ranch, recuperating from his gall-bladder operation, when Pat and Luci flew there on Oct. 29—presumably to obtain his permission to marry. It was widely surmised in print that the President, in an unusually dour mood, had vetoed their request. The situation evoked memories of Ulysses S. Grant, who brooded for 18 months before al lowing the dashing Algernon Sartoris to marry his Nellie, who was a tender 18 by the time she reached the altar.

Actually, Luci insists that they did not even mention matrimony to Lyndon that weekend. The big confrontation—surely one of the most unnerving encounters in the annals of courtship—occurred a couple of weeks later when the President returned briefly to the White House. As Luci entered the selfservice elevator with her father, Pat high-signed that he would meet her in the solarium. “Where’s Pat?” the President demanded. “Well, I want to see him. Go get him.” Pat was duly summoned into the presidential bedroom on the second floor. Asked Johnson: “What’s all this stuff I’ve been reading about in the papers?” Pat had his “little speech memorized word for word,” Luci says. “I’d heard it a thousand times.”

The oration over, they—meaning Lyndon—discussed what Luci called “the pros and cons,” while Pat, Luci and Lady Bird listened. Despite Aristotle’s advice that “it is fitting for the women to be married at about the age of 18,” Luci’s age was an issue. “He brought up the fact that I still had school to finish,” she recalls, “but then he said that married couples make better grades. He said the chances are that I might not be able to finish college, but then he said that I could go back and take courses later.” Having reached an affirmative consensus, the Johnsons announced the engagement Christmas Eve. Lyndon Johnson, who must regret having no sons of his own, told friends: “I really like that boy.” Soon he was calling Pat “Son-in-Law.”

Union Labels. As for the wedding, the Johnsons insisted at the beginning that it would be a family affair, the guest list restricted to the comparatively near and dear, the number held well below 1,000, which is about S.R.O. capacity at the White House. Though the National Shrine can accommodate 3,500, the Johnsons insisted that all their guests be invited to the reception as well as the ceremony. As the pre-wedding activities escalated, the White House requested that some of the parties, showers and receptions for the bride be canceled because the “wedding was becoming more of a spectacular than Mrs. Johnson and Luci feel it ought to be.”

The Johnsons took other precautions against criticism. A special account was set up, for instance, so that bills for invitations, food, extra help and other items would clearly be paid from their own resources rather than public funds. When it developed that Priscilla Kidder of Boston, who designed the bridesmaids’ and bridal gowns, has a nonunion workshop, the job of making the dresses was transferred to a plant in Lowell, Mass., so that the garments would carry union labels. When family friends in Milwaukee planned a dinner party, word got around that champagne would be served, although the legal drinking age there is 21. The hosts served apple cider instead.

Pacifist Protest. Virtually ignoring the torrent of expensive wedding gifts, White House handouts played up the sentimental, homey and offbeat: from Uncle Tony Taylor in Texas, a set of six silver syllabub cups that had belonged to Grandmother Minnie Lee Patillo Taylor; Texas-shaped cookie cutters from Mrs. Jake Pickle, wife of the Congressman who holds L.B.J.’s old seat; from Mrs. Orville Freeman, a jeweled Pakistani nose ring, symbolizing female submission to her mate (who, vows the bride, will never become “Mister Luci Johnson”). The bipartisan House leadership took up a collection for a congressional gift, but Iowa Republican H. R. Gross grouched that he was not going to contribute $5 for an “heiress” he did not know, and Luci gracefully requested that the idea be dropped. Other well-wishers sent the bride enough frilly garters to outfit the Folies-Bergère.

Some unpleasantness was inevitable. After Aug. 6 was set as the date, the Hiroshima World Friendship Center, an organization of Japanese and American pacifists, protested that this was the anniversary of the first A-bomb raid. Luci’s rumored reaction may be apocryphal, but it is not atypical: “O.K., how about December 7?” Another outfit, calling itself the Ad Hoc Committee for the August 6 Protest Against the War in Viet Nam, announced its intention to picket the National Shrine and the White House throughout the wedding celebration.

Most unpleasant of all were the digs in Congress and newspaper columns about Pat Nugent’s rather minimal military service in the Air National Guard,* at a time when hundreds of thousands of young Americans were serving in Viet Nam. (Lynda’s beau, Actor George Hamilton, has not helped in the image department either with his deferment as his mother’s sole source of support.) After completing basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Airman Third Class Nugent became vulnerable to further criticism by arranging a transfer to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, to serve the balance of his four-month active-duty tour less than an hour’s drive from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Pentagon explained that such transfers are granted routinely when feasible.

The Plump Raisin. Pat’s publicity problems were the least of the White House headaches. As the months ticked off, Social Secretary Bess Abell, Distaff Press Secretary Liz Carpenter and their combined staffs of seven became al most totally engrossed in nuptial arrangements, letting routine social functions pretty much run themselves. Mrs. Carpenter coped with staggering demands for invitations and information from all over the world. She also worked out an embargo system and a schedule of minutia-laden releases in order to control the flow of information. Last week’s wedding-cake handout was replete with detail, down to the birthplace of Pastry Chef Ferdinand Louvat (Grenoble) and the treatment of each seedless white raisin (soaked until plump) allowed into the cake.

For Luci, the last few months became a blurred montage of interviews and photographs, of last-minute domestic tips from her mother and from Cook Zephyr Wright, of shopping excursions in Manhattan and Washington, of parties and showers, of picking silverware (Old Maryland pattern) and china (Ambassador Limoges). After accompanying her father on a fast one-day swing through Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky late last month, she appeared so wan in public that the White House explained that she was exhausted, not ill. Nonetheless, at a press conference a few days earlier, Luci had proved more than a match for her inquisitors.

Yes, she confirmed, they would both attend the University of Texas, he to study for a master’s degree in business administration and she to work on a bachelor’s degree “in I don’t know what”—and Luci hinted that she might also take courses in typing and shorthand, which her father considers “the two greatest virtues” a woman can have. What would they do for income? “I haven’t heard,” she said archly, “of a lot of schools that give salaries.” Insisting nonetheless that they would support themselves, she confided that her fiance “has pretty much saved up because we haven’t been going places, and we feel as though we can make it with what we both have right now.” In all probability, Pat will work several hours a day at KTBC, the Johnson family TV station in Austin.

Their first house will be considerably more stylish than the average students’ quarters. Luci noted that it has “two skylights, which I find just great, and besides, they save electricity.” More specifically, the house at 1105 Heritage Way, of a type that rents for about $165 a month in Austin, is half of a new two-family duplex in one of the city’s better residential neighborhoods. The Nugents will have two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a cathedral ceiling in the living room, wall-to-wall carpeting in two rooms, an automatic dishwasher in the kitchen, air conditioning throughout, and of course a resident Secret Service man, who may occupy the adjacent house.

Regular Guy. Pat, meanwhile, has reacted stoically to the brouhaha. In his few appearances at public functions with Luci he has displayed studied sang-froid and said exactly what his position called for: virtually nothing. Luci’s fiancé, an acquaintance observed, has “a chameleon personality that allows him to fit in anywhere.”

He spent the last two weeks at Travis Air Force Base, Ga., on his first summer stint with the 133rd Nation al Guard Tactical Fighter Squadron, where his regular assignment was to work in a clerical section under a Negro master sergeant. His superiors and buddies alike were unanimous in pronouncing him a regular guy and a hard worker. He handled requests for interviews by not giving any. He was photographed on KP duty, and pictures of Nugent tromping down garbage and washing dishes got wide circulation.

Crypto-Republican? Pat’s discretion with the press obviously pleases the White House. “It’s Luci’s wedding,” he maintains. When pressed, he has insisted: “This is my private life and I will not discuss it.” Once, venturing a little further than usual when asked what it was like to be betrothed to a President’s daughter, Pat replied succinctly: “I’ve never been engaged before.” Nor, for that matter, has he ever previously been identified with the Democrats. No one will say whether Pat inherited his parents’ Republican sympathies or how he voted in 1964—although Tillie Nugent offers the diplomatic guess that her son plumped for his future father-in-law. The suspicion remains that a crypto-Republican is marrying into the Johnson family. As Cartoonist Fischetti had a friend telling the President: “You’re not losing a daughter, you’re gaining a vote.”

Try as he may to remain an ordinary citizen, the mantle of First Son-in-Law will inevitably shape his life. He is already, for example, chary of a career in the capital, where almost any job that he might take would leave him and the White House open to charges of influence. In Austin, at least, the newlyweds can take their place comfortably in the provincial squirearchy.

For Luci, the transition from White House Venus to Heritage Way housewife may not be as wrenching as it sounds. Despite her well-cushioned upbringing, life with Father has not always been easy, and she seems genuinely eager for a more relaxed and simple life. “I know there will be times of trouble,” she says, “as there have been before, and I can’t go running home to Mother and Daddy. But I feel we’ll be able to solve the problems. We can take the bad with the good.” Lady Bird’s “philosopher” adds with hill-country fatalism: “You must learn to live the very day you’ve got; you’re only going to have it once.” Facing the veriest day of her young life this week, Luci was clearly determined to savor every precious moment of it, public and private.

*Marie Monroe’s groom was Samuel Lawrence Gouverneur, her father’s private secretary and scion of a distinguished New York clan; Elizabeth Tyler’s groom was William Waller, a tobacco planter and lawyer; Nellie Grant’s Algernon Charles Frederick Sartoris came from a wealthy British family; Alice Roosevelt’s Nicholas Longworth was a Representative who later became House Speaker; Jessie Wilson’s was Francis Bowes Sayre, a lawyer; Eleanor Wilson’s was William Gibbs McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury; and Anna Roosevelt’s second husband was John Boet-tiger, a newspaper correspondent. *Whereby draft-eligible men may fulfill their military obligations by serving a few months on active duty and then participating in training sessions and summer encampments for a total of six years. During that time, their units may be mobilized at any time in case of local or national emergency.