Revealing tale of Capitol wife

Press, 27 February 1981, Page 6

Revealing tale of Capitol wife

NZPA Washington It is not every day that the wife of a United States congressman bares her breasts for the public. And in the ensuing uproar it doesn’t matter very much that she is a former wife and he is a former congressman. It is not just that Rita Jenrette, a 31-year-old blonde with what they call “an ample bosom,” has revealed all in the April issue of “Playboy” — where else? — but that she is now travelling around the country talking about it.

A press conference in New York on Monday, in Washington D.C. — where she admitted she and her handsome congressman husband once made love on the steps of the United States Capitol — on Tuesday, a nationwide TV appearance (clothed, that one) on Wednesday, and then on to Chicago, Houston, Toronto, and Los Angeles. It is all, she said, a contractual agreement. One that “Playboy” sees helping it sell 40,000 more copies in Washington, D.C., alone, and one that she sees helping sales of her yet-unpublished autobiography and her yet-un-proved career as a singer and actress. “I have never sought publicity,” she told her first press conference. “It just sort of happened.” It all began when the former Texas beauty queen married John Jenrette, recently-divorced Democratic congressman for South Carolina, five years ago. He drank to excess, was “incapable of monogamy.** the Mil iiwi«

last year was convicted in the notorious “Abscam” bribery trial. In that he was found to have taken money from Federal Bureau of Investigation agents posing as representatives of a fictitious Arab sheikh in return for promising to introduce a special immigration bill into Congress. He protested his innocence throughout, but after he had resigned his seat, she found $25,000 later identified by the FBI as being half the bribe money —- in one of his suede shoes in a wardrobe.

They separated and she donned black chiffon, red feather boas, black stockings, garter belts, and little else for the “Playboy” cameras. The 10-page picture spread concentrates on her bosom, but, in the coy words of the Washington “Post,” there is one “reclining pose with her legs in the air, closed but uplifted enough to reveal more than can be described in a family newspaper.” There "are also (clothed) pictures of her with former President Jimmy Carter, and his wife, Rosalynn, signed by the former first couple, and an article in which she tells ail. This included how he had been very good on women’s issues in Congress, how she had found him “at least 15 times” in the arms of other women and how he had tried to seduce a female television producer after telling the cameras how much he loved his wife who had stood by him through the AbMamtrW,