What president hosted his daughters prom

Susan liked life in the White House, partly because, after having been raised in a crowded house when she wasn’t living in a dorm, it was the first time she had ever had a bathroom to herself.

In the fall of the 1974-1975 school year, not long after the new president had told the country, as part of his barebones inaugural address, “Our long national nightmare is over,” one of Susan’s classmates, Gail Frawley (now Granowitz), had an idea. “We were having our prom meeting, and I said, ‘Why don’t we have the prom at the White House? Let’s ask Susan if it would be O.K.,’ ” she says.

Susan sought the approval of the White House chief usher, Rex Scouten, who was in charge of official functions, as well as the permission of her parents. “They said, ‘Yeah, as long as you pay the expenses, so it’s at no cost to the Federal government,’ ” Ford Bales recalls. “That’s what I remember.”

At Holton-Arms, Ford Bales was, in her words, “a B, C student.” She liked horseback riding, needlepoint, tennis, skiing, and photography. “In those days, you were cool, to have a camera hanging off your hip,” she says.

The only one of the four Ford children young enough to reside full time at the White House, she added freshness to Washington life in the aftermath of the dour Nixon years. The press found it amusing when she barged into the Oval Office to ask her father for her allowance, and she was photographed with Shan, her Siamese cat; and, again, in gym shorts and sunglasses, while washing her car on the White House driveway.

“Susan was very popular, and her social life was very important to her,” says Sally Alexander, who was head of the Holton-Arms English department in 1975. She adds that it was complicated for Susan, after she had made the transition from a relatively anonymous congressman’s daughter to someone in need of a security detail. “Her Secret Service men used to hang out in my office,” Alexander says. “I asked one of them one time, ‘When Susan goes on a date, how close do you have to be?’ He said, ‘Sally, our job is to protect Susan from outside danger, not to protect her from herself.’ ”

Her new status attracted unwanted attention from a fellow student on one occasion, Alexander recalls. “I remember one of our middle-school girls started writing Susan notes. It was as if Susan had ceased to be a senior at Holton and had become a princess. ‘Oh, maybe Susan will advise me about things that make me unhappy.’ The Secret Service had to get into that. Things like that were hard for Susan. She just wanted to be herself.”

But her new circumstances played to her advantage when it came to the site of the Holton-Arms prom.

In February, while the prom committee honed the details, the First Lady and the First Daughter (who was still planning to attend the affair with her longtime beau, Gardner Britt) took the shuttle to New York to visit a 31-year-old fashion designer, Albert Capraro, for a fitting at his Seventh Avenue office. After choosing clothes for an event she planned to attend in early May, the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival, Susan selected a “mandarin-neck slender jersey dress” for the prom, reported The New York Times.

Capraro, a former assistant to Oscar de la Renta who made his clothing in the U.S.A., was an easy choice as dressmaker for the First Daughter. “We bought lots of clothes from him,” Ford Bales says. A more difficult task was finding a band that could pass the White House security test.

“I was told that we had to choose a band that didn’t have any kind of drug charge,” recalls Helen Clark Atkeson, who chaired the prom committee and is now a lawyer in Denver. “They wanted to keep it squeaky clean, and it was pretty hard to find someone who met the criteria.”

“We tried to get the Beach Boys,” Ford Bales recalls.

The Beach Boys were interested enough to reduce their fee significantly, but negotiations broke down when the band insisted on filming the event for later use. And so the committee ended up choosing two less known bands: Sandcastle, a professional outfit from Richmond, Virginia, that played Top 40 songs at more than 200 shows a year; and a group that was more of a wild card, the Outerspace Band, whose long-haired members lived communally in a 12-bedroom, ramshackle house in Wendell, Massachusetts.

Formed in 1968 at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the Outerspace Band was a six-piece ensemble with a repertoire heavy on original songs and stylistic similarities to the Band and the Grateful Dead. Somehow these scruffy fellows—one of whom had a sister who was friends with a Holton-Arms student—passed Secret Service muster.

Eric Weiss, a Trinity alumnus who managed the band, worked out the details with the prom committee and the White House, agreeing to a fee of $350. “I think the contracts were signed in the White House,” says Weiss, now a lawyer in Manhattan. “The point of that show was to be the first band that had ever played at a prom there. Why not do a show at the White House, from the point of view of the band’s career?”

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