Leslie Uggams has sung with Louis Armstrong, starred in Roots (one of the most-watched TV series of all time), and traded zingers with Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool character. Still, nothing can quite compare to the time she met President Lyndon B. Johnson.
During his time as president between 1963 and 1969, Uggams, then an in-demand performer, says she was invited by the White House to sing for Johnson and guests.
When she was offered a tour of the White House by the president himself, she and the other invited performers couldn’t resist.
“The next thing you know he says, ‘Hey, you want to come up to the second floor?’ We were like, ‘Yeah!’ Who gets to go up there other than the people who live there?” Uggams, 75, recalls.
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“So he’s giving us a tour of everything and he’s talking. You know how when there’s a group of you, like at a museum, and you may stop to look at a painting longer than the others — well I was walking with the president. We were ahead of Bob Hope and the rest of the people that were entertaining. And we get to a bedroom, and he says, ‘Oh this is the famous Lincoln Bed.’ And I say, ‘Wow this is a part of history.’ And so he shows me the bed and slyly says, ‘I sure would like to get you onto that bed.’ I was like… what?”
And that’s when someone famous came in to save the day.
“But just as my eyes were crossing, Bob Hope came and walked into the bedroom and that was the end of that,” Uggams adds.
Deadpool 2 is in theaters.