Sex Lives of the Presidents by Nigel Cawthorne

Author:Nigel Cawthorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

15

A PRESIDENT FRUSTRATED

Weighing over three hundred pounds and standing six foot tall, William Howard Taft was the largest president but he spent his life under the heel of two small, slim women. He was plainly a man who liked to be dominated and he found the perfect dominatrix in his wife Helen.

His masochism began with his domineering mother, Louisa. She and her sister, Delia, had travelled together as young women and had vowed not to marry. When Louisa took up with Alphonso Taft, seventeen years her senior and a man who could bring her the social status she craved, Delia wrote despairingly: ‘Oh Louise, Louise, how can I live the rest of my life without you? I am but one half of a pair of scissors.’

Alphonso had been married before. His first wife described the marriage as an ‘unbroken sea of unhappiness’. He was stiff and Victorian. His second marriage was equally cold. Louisa always referred to her husband as Mr Taft. When he died, she resumed her travels with her sister.

Louisa constantly complained that Taft was large for his age, grew fatter every day and ‘he has such a large waist that he cannot wear any of the dresses that are made with belts.’ But it was her constant chiding that made him overeat.

When Taft left home, he found himself unhappy. He was used to Louisa dominating his life. Soon he found the perfect substitute, Helen ‘Nellie’ Herron. She had a personality much like his mother’s. He pursued her with ardour for two long years. She did not respond with passion, but slowly began to realize that Taft could help her to fulfil her lifelong ambition to be First Lady.

At the age of seventeen, Helen had stayed in the White House as a guest of President Hayes. She had not ‘come out’ yet, ‘so I couldn’t spend my time in the White House as I would have liked in going to brilliant parties and meeting all manner of charming people,’ she lamented. However, she got a taste for Washington and in 1912 she told a New York Times reporter that she had vowed to marry only a man ‘destined to be President of the United States’.

In fulfilling that ambition, Nellie has been compared to ‘chilled steel’, but otherwise, she was neurotic. As a girl, she shied away from the social whirl because she feared sexual relationships. Young men made her tremble. She hated them. She got on better with married men ten or more years her senior.

‘This matter of fancying people is inexplicable,’ she wrote in her diary. At twenty-two, she still claimed to be ‘utterly indifferent’ to men. However, she and her girlfriend Sally visited a ‘Bohemian’ barroom opposite the Music Hall in Cincinnati, where they drank beer and smoked cigarettes. This, she boasted, was ‘rather fast’.

The year after her visit to the White House, Nellie had invited childhood friend William Taft to one of her ‘salons’, where they talked about Washington. From the beginning he adored her, but she tried to calm his passion.

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