Fenwick Saves Taxpayers Money for Hotel Room

ROME — True to her style, pipe-smoking Millicent Fenwick is staying with friends rather than spend U.S. taxpayers’ money at a hotel before returning home to begin retirement at the age of 77.

“I had to get out of my apartment because a colleague wants it,” said Fenwick, a former four-term New Jersey congresswoman. “I’m staying with an old friend, so there’s no expense for anybody. I’ve always been terribly aware of spending other people’s money.”

She ends her four-year stint as the first U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in the same style she began it. When she came to Rome in August, 1983, she turned down the Cadillac limousine that went with the job.

“When you are involved with an agency designed to help the starving,” she said, “a Chevrolet, a Ford or a Plymouth, please. A certain restraint is called for.”

The slender, gray-haired grandmother of 11 will return to her 50-room French provincial mansion in Bernardsville, N.J.

“I haven’t got any plans,” she said. “Isn’t that heavenly?”