One Summer: America, 1927

he was in Leavenworth, but he would be released in November having served just one year and eight months.
    In his autobiography, Coolidge was wonderfully coy about all this. He didn’t mention Teapot Dome at all and had merely this to say about Harding’s last days:
     
I do not know what had impaired his health. I do know that the weight of the Presidency is very heavy. Later it was disclosed that he had discovered that some whom he had trusted had betrayed him, and he had been forced to call them to account. It is known that this discovery was a very heavy grief to him, perhaps more than he could bear. I never saw him again. In June he started for Alaska and – eternity.
     
    Although Harding was not personally implicated in any of the corruption – his only crime was to be a complete fool – his reputation was ruined. By the summer of 1927, it seemed as if it could sink no lower. Then it sank lower.
    In July, an attractive young woman of his intimate acquaintance named Nan Britton produced an eye-poppingly juicy book called The President’s Daughter . The story was unedifying but irresistible. As a schoolgirl in Marion, Ohio, Miss Britton had formed a crush on her father’s handsome friend, the stately Mr Harding, proprietor of the Marion Star . Harding was thirty-one years Britton’s senior and was in any case engaged in a hot affair with his wife’s bestfriend – he truly was a bit of a dog – so a crush was as far as things ever seemed likely to go.
    But then Miss Britton did something that Warren Harding always found hard to resist: she grew into womanhood. Meeting again some time later, Harding was moved and smitten. Miss Britton was only too willing. They embarked on a passionate affair. Harding was now a successful politician, and Miss Britton often accompanied him on the campaign trail, generally posing as his niece. On 22 October 1919, she gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Britton was twenty-three, he was fifty-four. Harding did the decent thing and supported Britton with regular payments of $100 or $150. He also continued relations with Britton as his political career blossomed, but he never saw the child. With his sudden death the payments to Britton ceased. When Harding’s family refused to extend any additional support, she decided to reveal all in a book.
    No mainstream publisher would touch it, so Britton set up a special imprint, the Elizabeth Ann Guild, to produce it. Even then, Britton alleged, she received anonymous threats, her phone lines were cut and a truck carrying the printing plates for the book was torched. When The President’s Daughter came out in July 1927, Harding’s reputation had already reached what seemed an unsurpassable nadir, but now the reading public rushed to find out what an unprincipled rascal he was.
    The best-thumbed passages in every household were those dealing with their trysts in the White House. Miss Britton did not want for candour. She recorded how the president, consumed with lust, bundled her into
     
the one place where, he said, he thought we might share kisses in safety. This was a small closet in the ante-room, evidently a place for hats and coats, but entirely empty most of the times we used it, for we repaired there many times in the course of my visits to the White House, and in the darkness of a space notmore than five feet square the President of the United States and his sweetheart made love.
     
    They also convened in apartments that Harding borrowed from pals.
    Britton’s book was a combination of wild improbabilities (that Harding wrote her love letters up to sixty pages long) and indubitably accurate descriptions of the interior of the White House (particularly when seen from floor level).
    It was so scandalous that few publications reviewed it. Many bookstores provided it to customers only on request. Many others would not sell it at all. Even so, the book sold 50,000 copies in its first six months at $5 a copy, at a time when $5 was a lot of money. (Half a day’s pay for Lindbergh as an airmail pilot, for instance.) One of the few publications to review it – though not until it had been out for three months – was the New Yorker . There, Dorothy Parker called it ‘the most amazing work that has yet found its way into these jittering hands … For when Miss Britton gets around to revealing, Lord, how she does reveal.’
    All this could not have come at a worse time for the memory of Warren