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Senator Long's official connection with his State government is now confined to special, but profitable, services. The State Public Service Commission has the free legal advice of the State Attorney General but lately it has employed Mr. Long as counsel. Recently the Commission ordered Baton Rouge water and electric rates reduced, to which the utilities agreed. For his services in this unexciting transaction Senator Long charged the State $5,600. Last week he was again in Baton Rouge to represent the Commission which had ordered a telephone rate reduction. But this time Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph Co. opposed the move and the Senator announced that his fee would be $20,000.
Without Baggage. Most new Senators bring their wives, families and careers with them to Washington. Senator Long went to the Capital with no such baggage. For obvious reasons national politics, up until a few months ago, was only a side show to him. His two boys, Russell Billiu, 16, and Palmer Reed, 13, stay in high school at New Orleans. His daughter, Rose Lolita, 17, last year a bright freshman at Newcomb College, this year a sophomore at her father's Louisiana State University, occasionally visits Washington with her mother. But by & large Papa Long now has little time for family life in Washington.
On his arrival in Washington, the Louisiana Senator lived at the Mayflower Hotel, with the usual two rooms in the Senate Office Building. On his evenings off he liked to go out to night clubs. Now all that is changed. His private life, such as it is, is lived at the Broadmoor, an apartment hotel on Connecticut Avenue. There he has a three-room & kitchenet apartment, with one or more of his bodyguards occupying the outer room and changing the records on the phonograph that is kept going from the time the Senator gets up at 8 o'clock in the morning. In the back room the Senator sleeps, and gives interviews—sometimes sitting sleepy-eyed on the edge of his bed; sometimes while picking out one of the gaudy shirts laid out by Murphy, his husky valet; sometimes in the bathroom brushing his teeth. Occasionally that apartment is also the scene of parties that he gives for male associates from New Orleans.
Office No. 143. The most important part of the Long plant in Washington is Office No. 143 in the Senate Office Building, not two rooms now, but five, more than any other Senator occupies. Even in that space he is so crowded that the 21 men and girls who clerk for him from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p. m. are followed by a night shift of 14 who work from 5:30 to 11:130.