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Code Name Venus. Toward this end, the White House has more and more resembled a strategic command post as the prenuptial months shortened into weeks, the weeks into days. Mother and bride pored endlessly over lists of names before culling a roster of 700-plus guests. Myriad flowers were planted and nurtured, a raft of invitations elegantly addressed by three staff calligraphers. Dresses had to be selected for the bride and her attendants, a trousseau acquired, security arrangements settled and—after a parade of cardboard-and-frosting mock-up models worthy of changeover season in Detroit—the wedding cake approved and confected.
The result may be Texan-presidential in scale, but in detail the wedding bears all the diverse and diverting hallmarks of Luci Johnson. The bride-to-be is at once gay and fey and deeply religious. She displays Johnson traits in abundance: she is strong-willed and sensitive, voluble and introspective, fiercely loyal to her family yet irrepressibly independent. Lady Bird describes her younger daughter as both a "sprite" and a "philosopher." Lyndon Johnson once said: "I have known this little ruler all her life. She entered the world with a commanding voice and has been taking over ever since." Luci, who calls herself a "theatrical person" and a "romantic," says mysteriously: "I am a blue-eyed daughter in a brown-eyed family." She elaborates: "I know I'm very different from the rest of my family. My interests are not the same and my physical appearance is not the same. Sometimes I think I scare them."
The eyes that set her apart are a deep and striking blue. Endowed as well with lustrous black hair, flashing smile and a milkmaid's complexion, Luci is undeniably comely—more so than most of her photographs indicate. Not entirely by accident, the Secret Service code name for her is Venus; Lynda, more studious and serious, is Velvet; Lady Bird is Victoria.
Muddling Through. As a girl, Luci often seemed the victim of a younger-sibling complex, which she assuaged with the usual attention-getting gambits of childhood and adolescence. It was not a conventional upbringing for either Luci or her older sister Lynda Bird, now 22, because of frequent separations from their parents. Throughout the "deprivileged" years, as the sisters call them, Father was in perpetual political motion in Washington and Texas while Mother had the family interests to mind; until Luci was eleven, even her school year was divided between Austin and Washington. Most summers she went to camp in Texas. Always striving to be grown up, always "eleven going on 16," as a contemporary puts it, she changed the y in her first name to i for no apparent reason years ago, got mediocre grades in school until a sight problem was discovered and treated, muddled capriciously through the difficult years.