ITT Lobbyist Dita Beard agreed last week to talk about her past with TIME Correspondent Ted Hall. It was only days before she was to face a grilling by U.S. Senators investigating Columnist Jack Anderson's charges that she had written a memo linking the Nixon Administration's settlement of an antitrust case against ITT with a company contribution to the Republican National Convention (see THE PRESS). The rumbustious Mrs. Beard, 53, refused to discuss her role in the ITT controversy, but was not at all shy about revealing intimate, if sometimes confused details of her earlier days. Hall's report:
DRESSED in a navy blue nightgown with white piping at the neckline, Dita Beard chain-smoked cigarettes in Room 269 of Denver's 178-bed Rocky Mountain Osteopathic Hospital behind a sign that said NO SMOKING PLEASE, OXYGEN IN USE. Under treatment for a heart ailment, Dita was well protected against unwanted visitors by tight screening. Western Union called with a telegram that had to be read to her personally. The message: GET YOUR FAT ASS BACK—THERE'S NO ONE TO BUY DRINKS. Dita's laugh rumbled from her diaphragm. "Must be my old drinking buddies from the club," she explained.
The way Dita tells it, her life has had its grim moments, but mostly it was fun. Her job at ITT "got better and better—it was beautiful until those sons of bitches pulled this one on me." She was apparently referring to Columnist Anderson and his legman Brit Hume. "I started raising hell when I was born, and I ain't quit yet," she said. Her father Robert Davis was serving in Germany as an Army colonel when she was born at Fort Riley, Kans., in 1918. Her parents at one point had three birth certificates prepared with different names: Alsace Lorraine, Roberta and Adele Fournier. She does not know how she wound up with the name Dita. The family moved to Fort Monmouth, N.J., where, she claims, her father was so important in helping build up the Signal Corps that his photo was prominently displayed. "He built the goddam place," she says. "But when it got big, some son of a bitch took Dad's picture down."
Mann Act. Dita grew up as an Army brat, moving from base to base. She adored her father, who treated her like a boy, made her learn to ride almost as soon as she could walk. "Every morning at 5:30, the goddam horses were at the back door," she recalls of a stay in the Panama Canal Zone. She was on a raft there once, swimming with her father, when a "goddam crocodile was skulking under the raft." He ordered her to swim for shore anyway.
Dita claims that she moved too often to finish high school. Her mother, an amateur concert singer who loved to travel ("She didn't care much for me"), would take her out of school on trips whenever Army transportation looked tempting. Her father bought a 300-acre spread, Rising Wolf Ranch, in Montana, and Dita spent summers there as a child. "Dad thought nothing of giving me a gun and a fishing rod and telling me to go off for a couple of weeks. I learned to be very independent." He retired from the Army in grand style in 1930, she claims. "He hit his commanding general over the head with a riding crop at the officer's club—we never did know which was drunker."