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She did have some tapes, though there was dispute over whether they were merely her own recollections, or included her partners' voices. Says a congressional source: "No doubt about it, she's been making tapes. She's been telephoning Senators and Congressmen and asking them, 'Honey, do you remember that night when ... ?'" Whatever they said went into her recorders. It's enough to give a public servant cardiac arrest." It was also enough to prompt a number of legislators to deny having ever had anything to do with Ray. "Nonsense, sheer and utter nonsense," said Hubert Humphrey to rumors linking him to her.
Ray was enjoying her long-sought celebrity. She had come a long way from Marshall, N.C., where her mother still lives in a rickety trailer. No longer was she merely the Southern girl who had lost the Miss Asheville contest, then got her nose bobbed and failed to make an acting career in Hollywood. Last week the whir of TV cameras and the pop of flashbulbs echoed in her tacky apartment in Arlington, Va. She was not the second Marilyn Monroe that she had yearned to become, but at least she was guided and comforted by her agent, her psychiatrist, her lawyer and her nurse.
Indignantly she turned down an offer of $25,000 to bare all for Hustler, but before the headlines inflated her price, she had posed, full frontal, for the September Playboy (fee: $250). She gave TV interviews with promiscuous delight, and under a federal grant of immunity from prosecution, she was singing like a mockingbird to the FBI, which was investigating Wayne Hays to see if there was any fraud against the Government.
She has plenty to tell. A former assistant to Hays recalls that when Liz Ray started working in the Congressman's office in the spring of 1974, she was a disaster: unable to type twelve words a minute, forgetting the names of callers, snapping at people. Soon she was eased out of formal duties—but not off the payroll. After that, her contacts with the office were mostly private phone calls to Hays; they were wild, frequent, and insulting to the staff. Typically, she would bark: "Let me talk to him!" The staff knew that the calls were to get the same priority as calls from Henry Kissinger.
Hidden Recorder. About the only time that Liz would show up at the office, according to the former assistant, would be for official receptions. In flashy tight clothes that played up her bosom, she flung herself toward photographers, urging Hays to get her pictured with Congressmen or celebrities. A former Hays staffer says she liked to pose "with lots of suggestion of mouth action." Once, Hays snapped at her: "For Christ's sake, you've been in enough pictures!"
Because Hays was carrying on with his Ohio-based secretary, Pat Peak, whom he visited weekly and finally married last April, many of his staffers did not figure that he was also dallying with Liz. They simply concluded that he was passing her round to his friends in Congress in return for political favors. Yet Hays did not try to give the impression that he was celibate when in the capital. Most mornings, a former aide says, he would brag to his staff of his purported conquests of the night before.