The foibles of Donald Sterling and his mistress have somehow managed to remind me of these guys, another pair with a rather large age gap, and who represented what in those days (1974) passed for an ethnically diverse couple:

For Wilbur Mills, Democratic congressman from Arkansas who held the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee for 17 years, longer than anyone in history, being caught drunk and in a dalliance with Argentine stripper Fanne Foxe precipitated the end of his political career, although it actually was a second similar incident that administered the coup de grace.

Compared to Sterling and his lady friend, Mills was positively youthful when all this happened (65), and Foxe comparatively geriatric at 38.

In an aside, I noticed on Foxe’s Wiki page that she earned a spot on Time magazine’s 2009 list of history’s top 10 mistresses (although, strangely enough, she appears to be number eleven). My, my my! Who even knew Time had compiled such a list?

Here’s the roster, in case you’re wondering. Quite a few of the women have names that no longer ring a bell, having passed to obscurity in the five years since the list was compiled, showing how fleeting fame can be. And one of them wasn’t even a mistress: Anne Boleyn, who got a bum rap not only from Henry but from history, it seems.

Do most people even know that one of the reasons Henry VIII was so keen to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Boleyn was that Anne held out on him sexually and insisted on marriage as the prerequisite? She had watched what had happened to her sister Mary, who’d been Henry’s previous mistress, had gotten pregnant by him, and been effectively abandoned by him, and Anne had no intention of going the same route.

So it’s ironic that Anne’s on a list of mistresses when she was bound and determined not to be one. Also ironic that, in order to behead her, Henry falsely accused her of infidelity. Anne was ambitious, but she was sexually faithful to both Henry and her marriage vows. She was also very smart, although that didn’t help her much when arrayed against the formidable forces of a king who wanted to be rid of her. But her daughter, Elizabeth I, probably inherited her brilliance from both her parents.

[NOTE: It would be nicely symmetrical if I could list Henry and Anne as still another May/December romance gone wrong. But it wouldn’t really be true because, at the time of their marriage, Henry was 42 and Anne (whose birthdate has been disputed) was somewhere between 26 and 32. That’s an age gap, all right, but not such a big one, and Henry was still a relatively young man.]

[NOTE II: Here’s an interesting tidbit on Mills:

His accomplishments in Congress included playing a large role in the creation of the Medicare program. Mills initially had reservations about the program because he was worried about the eventual cost, but eventually shepherded it through Congress and had a large hand in shaping its program.]