Fanne: Acting 18 and Feeling 50

Fanne Foxe, Mrs. Annabella Battistella, the other woman in Wilbur Mills' life, was born in a village 175 miles southwest of Buenos Aires, where her Indian-Spanish father, Oswaldo Villagra, was a male nurse and local politician. She was a skinny tomboy who dressed in white overalls cut from her father's old medical uniforms. At 20, Annabella married Eduardo Battistella and eventually followed him around South America, where he played the piano in nightclubs. Finally, their savings depleted, she turned from dancing to striptease. In the early '60s, the couple settled in the U.S. Their parallel itinerant nightclub careers continued, and so did their troubled marriage. They became neighbors, close friends and regular bridge companions with Wilbur and Polly Mills in 1973. The Battistellas were divorced in October, but Eduardo sometimes stays in the apartment with Annabella and their four children, aged 15 to 19.

In interviews last week with Sally Quinn of the Washington Post, Pat Collins of CBS and TIME Reporter Russ Hoyle, Annabella tried to explain in a soft, Latin-accented voice the roots of her unlikely friendship with the chairman. A sampler follows:

TO QUINN: I guess it is not ridiculous that any woman would like to be married to Wilbur Mills, I think he could be a perfect husband. I would like to marry somebody older than my former husband.

I would like somebody mature. I've been around too long. I may act sometimes like I'm 18, but I feel like I'm 50. When you've had to turn the other cheek all your life, it makes you hard. Well, maybe not hard, but it tempers your heart.

Mr. Mills didn't want me to go back to work. Not because of the publicity, but because I promised him for the kids' sake I wouldn't go back to being a stripper. He told me I broke my word. I did. I will have to live with that.

I think he learned what the life of a human being was after he met me and my family. He felt at 65 he had missed a lot and wanted to enjoy life. He's not himself. He's changed. He's having a nervous breakdown, I think, but more physical than mental causes.

I know he loves me very much in one way ... Maybe he sees me as the kind of person he would like to have met when he was young. Not as a stripper. Just me. As a person. I do have a lot of feeling for him. I've loved him ever since we became friends. And my children love him. He deserves loyalty. He's got loyalty for me.

TO COLLINS: Not many people know Mr. Mills, and the public just knows him through speeches, campaigning ... but people don't really know him the way he is. I always say he's a kid at heart, you know. He is a young man in an old body, that's all ... He came out of his shell and it's the first time.

I don't know if he is wise or not, but he doesn't seem to be embarrassed. He seems to be glad that it happened so people would know the way he is. I was afraid for public opinion.

TO HOYLE: I have been all my life a very immature person. I never grew up, despite all the knowledge I managed to acquire. I left my country, I left my family when I needed it most. After my father died, something like a part of myself died with him. I look back and I see a girl. Her name was Bebe Villagra and I admire her and it's nice to watch her in my mind, the beautiful things she did, and how happy she was, and how much of a devil she was. But it's not there, it's not me.

I was always a very strong girl. I was never bothered by other people unless I did something myself I didn't consider right. Only when I saw that I hurt somebody's feelings, when I did something to make myself look ridiculous or not ladylike, like when I fell in the Tidal Basin, do I feel guilty. The next day I just couldn't sleep and I have been thinking ever since. It was just a stupid accident, but it happened.

I'm not that ambitious. I like to have money. I am secure, I eat well, I don't worry, but in the process of making money I destroy myself, I really do.

I used to have a way to let my emotions out, something I don't have now because I became like a lamb. I don't fight any more. I don't argue any more, everything is all right with me. Nothing that happens in this world seems to bother me any more.

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