Dita Beard on Dita Beard

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."

At 17, Dita got a job modeling women's clothing. "I could wear sizes 11 to 16, depending on the maker." She refused to model anything as skimpy as a bathing suit, but traveled with a salesman to display clothes in stores in Western states. When he asked her how old she really was and she confessed, she says, "the poor bastard turned 17 shades of green." He told her she was through with the job. "I told him, 'If you fire me, I'll get you for the Mann Act.' He called his wife, and she joined us in Reno and traveled with us after that."

Dita admits to liking booze early in life. In her late teens she recalls being lonely at a Navy officers' club in Seattle on Christmas Eve. She found twelve equally lonely officers. "We got suffer than 900 planks." The family moved to Los Angeles, where Dita helped exercise horses at an exclusive club. She remembers that Joan Crawford's horse Red Satin was part of the stable. Later, in Washington, the Davis family lived in high society, so she tells it, entertaining the Cordell Hulls (he was Secretary of State under F.D.R.) and Idaho Senator William Borah ("Mother was a terrific Republican"). Dita came out at a debutante ball at Washington's Carlton hotel in 1939. "It was like a wedding without the agony of being married," she sighs.

Living in Washington, Dita claims she "got engaged to three men at the same time": a Far East expert in the Dutch embassy, an Army officer and an Italian naval attache. Since the Dutchman gave her the prettiest ring, she agreed to visit him in Honolulu, traveling on a Matson liner. "They were all interested in this long, lanky female traveling alone. We had a party that wouldn't stop." She ditched the Dutchman in Hawaii, but claims she met Ernest Hemingway there. "He called me Princess." As she booked passage home, "I saw this gorgeous hunk of body with the little tiny behind, and I went to the desk and learned that it was leaving that afternoon on the Matsonia. 'Book me on it,' I said." That, she claims, was how she became friendly for a time with Baseball Player Hank Greenberg.

Six-by-Six. During the war, Dita first worked as "a troubleshooter" for the Board of Economic Warfare. "I just stamped and signed and got things moving." She joined the Red Cross. "We were sent to George Washington University to learn to play poker and shoot craps--things that I was born doing." She was then sent to an Army camp where, she complains, "they had us getting up at 5 in the morning cooking for the goddam WACs." She got out of that by becoming a truck driver even after the motor-pool officer "checked me out on a six-by-six, and I ground the gears and choked it and screwed up."

Shipped overseas, Dita did not care for all the Red Cross clothing she had to wear or carry. "We had to walk six miles carrying those goddam suitcases to the ship." But Dita says hers was heavier than the others. "Everyone else had nice dainty underwear in their suitcases, and here I got twelve bottles of booze." She served in Casablanca, Algiers and for 13 months on Corsica, getting to know a lot of military airmen. She claims that she "used to fly P-47s sitting on the pilot's lap."

She married a fighter pilot, Benjamin Atwood, in 1945. She declines to talk about the marriage except to say that they had three children. Atwood died in a plane crash in 1967, many years after they were divorced. In 1952, she married Cameron Randolph Beard, a flag manufacturer, and they had two children. He was "very wealthy, very wonderful, and also, he was an alcoholic. So there's me and five children, a drunk husband and two dogs." One son was injured in an automobile accident ("You can still see the tire prints across his chest"), and she tried to nurse them both. That, she says, was when her heart began to bother her. (She and Beard are divorced, and he now lives in retirement on a Tennessee farm, where he is a successful member of Alcoholics Anonymous.) "With no father or husband to get in the way, the kids and I did very well. I knew a woman had no right to bring up boys, so I put the two older boys into military schools. Then I had a housekeeper who was like a member of the family--just wonderful."

That brought Dita up to the point of becoming a lobbyist for ITT. Throughout her reminiscing, she remained good humored and spoke with a strong voice. "When my health was good, I wasn't afraid of anything," Dita said in parting. "Not even of that bunch of little bums coming out here. But I don't know how I'm going to face it."

On a ground-floor conference room of the hospital, workmen were setting up tan folding chairs from which Dita Beard would be quizzed by seven members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She would be wheel-chaired to the room and face them from a bed. A nurse with emergency equipment would be stationed outside the door.

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