Washington's latest sex scandal

If Ronald Reagan's election signalled a revival of conservative values - a victory for the "moral majority" - it was hardly apparent in Washington. The nation's capital clung tenaciously to its reputation as America's most libidinous city.Throughout the past fortnight, as Reagan was making history by announcing plan after plan to dismantle the welfare state, Americans were mostly paying attention to another story - a story about boudoirs and lust and the sexcapades of the high and mighty, the kind of lascivious goings-on that once caused comedian Mark Russell to describe Washington as Sodom-and-Gomorrah-on-the-Potomac.It's the kind of story in which people publicly profess a prudish lack of interest but privately lap up every detail. And who can blame them! The story has all the ingredients of a best seller: sex, power, crime, money and politics. Actually there are two stories: the kiss-and-tell tales of Rita Jenrette, the alienated wife of former Congressman John Jenrette, and the carnal cavortings of Paula Parkinson, the sultry seductress in Washington's latest sex scandal. They have common elements.Both Rita and Paula caught the public's eye when they busted onto the national stage through the pages of Playboy magazine in which they had posed naked. Rita's feat was historically titillating in that she became the first congressional spouse ever to pose for Playboy. Reporters trying to keep abreast of the story have discovered that since their Playboy debut the two women have become bosom buddies - they now share an apartment in New York's Greenwich Village where they are writing their memoirs.Rita and John Jenrette at the Taj on a congressional junket to IndiaFantasies: The focus of both their stories is Capitol Hill, the white-domed abode of the US Congress where legislative feats go hand-in-hand with sexual rites, where a bill is often passed in exchange for a bagful of cash or for the price of an orgasm. The men of the US Congress are no more or no less corrupt than their ilk in other parts of the world. Very often they are people from small towns across America who are dazzled and mesmerised by Washington, the beguiling temptress. Washington is fat city.They are wined and dined by lobbyists. They can snap their fingers and cash or booze or women - there is a never ending supply - will appear as if by magic. Ultimately many members of Congress become captives of their own inflated life-styles - they mistakenly believe that they are powerful enough to live out any fantasy. Their fantasies come back to strangle them.Both Rita and Paula were part of the Capitol whirligig - Rita as the wife of a powerful member of the House of Representatives and Paula as a lobbyist who made daily rounds of Congress. They were insiders. They learned the system, its weaknesses, and how to milk it for profit. The profits of notoriety are nothing new in Washington. Scandals often create millionaires. The Watergate gang - Richard Nixon, John Ehrichmann, Gordon Liddy, John Dean - the last three of whom went to jail for conspiring to rip off the US Government - are all rolling in money coming in from books, memoirs and lecture tours.Rita Jenrette: Baring and telling allRita would like her public to believe that she's different, that she's whistleblower, a martyr. Her story is a super con job devised byPlayboy'spublic relations men who have her under contract to make hundreds of public appearances and to appear on TV talk shows to speak about the "Liberation of a Congressional Spouse". What remains unsaid is that these appearances are designed to sell morePlayboysand generate interest in a book she's writing and a movie she's planning.Appeals: "For people to listen to her she's got to be something special," says an observer. "A lot of people will say, 'she's just another broad who got paid for showing her tits. So why listen to her'. " So Rita's tale is packaged with heavy "messages" to win the sympathy of feminists, of traditional women and housewives and of liberal intellectuals looking for causes.If she merely went on stage or on an interview show and said, 'Hi, I'm Rita Jenrette, I posed nude for Playboy', people would be curious for a while, ogle her, and move on. There would be little else left to talk about. It would neither help sell more copies of Playboy nor enhance Rita's future profitability. So, there's got to be something heavy, just to keep the conversation going.She tells a mushy, lachrymose tale that appeals to people for sympathy. Rita, the star-crossed woman, arrives in Washington and marries a recently-divorced, dashing young Congressman. She sacrifices (so she claims) a singing career to become a congressional Barbie doll, smiling when asked to smile, passing out leaflets at supermarkets, being polite to bores, never expressing her own opinions. She loves John completely. Inside her lurks a rebel. A gypsy. She is never quite comfortable with Washington's elites.Lobbyist Paula Parkinson: Countless careers in her handsAfter they've been married four years she begins to feel humiliated. John is incapable of monogamy. In John lurks an insatiable sexual satyr. Women and power are getting to John's head. By 1980 John's in trouble. He's been caught by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the Abscam scandal - an undercover operation in which FBI agents posed as Arab Sheikhs and enticed unsuspecting Congressmen to take cash bribes in exchange for favourable legislation.The Story: John's troubles mount, he takes refuge in alcohol. Rita obediently runs the house and pays tuition fees for John's children from his previous marriage. John tells her he's innocent, he took no bribes. One day, she finds John's shoe box stuffed with $25,000 (Rs 200,000) in 100 dollar bills of Abscam money. The final humiliation. Curtains. She dumps John to resume her singing career. She bares all in Playboy, sounding a clarion call for congressional reform. Bribery and corruption in Congress, she says, will persist unless there's public financing of congressional campaigns.Rita's dumping her confining marriage and striking out again on an independent career is designed to appeal to the feminists. Other women are expected to sympathise with her for her domestic sacrifices and for putting up so long with wandering John. Intellectuals are expected to get the message of congressional reform. Feminists no doubt, will have to ponder the dilemma that Playboy, long condemned by them as a bastion of male chauvinism, should suddenly become the vehicle through which women liberate themselves.But the truth is that Rita was always part of Washington's beautiful people. She had worked on Capitol Hill and with the National Republican Committee before she met John. The tuition money she paid for John's kids was money she had drawn from John's bank account for herself. And she was paid about pound 40,000 (Rs 320,000) for her Playboy pictures.In between the "messages" and the heavy stuff is the really spicy stuff that Rita casually drops in. This is what she is really selling: Rita and John made love in the open on the steps leading up to the Capitol. A prominent governor of a state who was a house guest once entered the bathroom while Rita was trying to taking a shower and tried to make love to her. Rita attended wild parties with senior bureaucrats and Capitol Hill types in which they stripped naked in the kitchen and then bathed together in a hot tub.Revelations: Paula Parkinson's story is still unfolding with the country's best newshounds in hot pursuit. She has no qualms about being called a blonde sex symbol. Columnist Jack Anderson first broke the story about the busty lobbyist's Washington carousings with several members of Congress and other high muck-a-mucks that she has videotaped and now plans to sell to the highest bidder. She may hold in her hands the careers and futures of countless Washington politicians and dignitaries with whom she had affairs and whom she plans to expose in a future book.Paula became a lobbyist after her marriage to Hank Parkinson in 1979, who is in the same business. He taught her the ropes and encouraged her to stalk the corridors of Capitol Hill in pursuit of favourable votes on special interest legislation. Paula learned quickly, as she candidly admitted in a Playboy interview: "Washington is basically a very horny city." She admits being sexually propositioned by more than 100 members of Congress, half of whom promised to vote in favour of bills Paula was lobbying for, in return for sexual favours.According to a Jack Anderson column now being written, Parkinson liked to target "particularly interesting men - mostly those with titles - and then stalk them until she scored... apparently she scored with startling frequency. At 'truth sessions' with her husband she blithely confessed intimate details about dozens of sexual experiences she had with some of America's biggest names." Her now-estranged husband, who denies knowing about Paula's Bacchanalian activities until she confessed them to him as their marriage began to fall apart, said that her idea of videotaping bigshots in pornographic poses with her began with a fantasy. Hank recalls in a proposal for a book that he is planning to write: "She fantasised frequently about a particular Congressman and a certain senator she would love to get on tape. 'They both have no class,' she once said, 'and the world deserves to see them with their pants down'."Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 22, 2013 09:31 IST--- ENDS ---

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Washington's latest sex scandal

If Ronald Reagan's election signalled a revival of conservative values - a victory for the "moral majority" - it was hardly apparent in Washington. The nation's capital clung tenaciously to its reputation as America's most libidinous city.

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