Elizabeth Lauten’s biggest problem, perhaps, was that she picked on the wrong White House daughters. Following her pious hectoring of Malia Obama, 16, and her sister Sasha, 13—for merely looking a bit bored and wearing short skirts at the presidential pardon of a turkey—Lauten not only finds herself out of a job but also with her reputation badly damaged from a report in the Smoking Gun that she was arrested for shoplifting when she was 17, a year older than Malia is now.

If only Lauten, the former communications director to Tennessee Republican Rep. Stephen Fincher, had been around in Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s day. Now there was a presidential daughter you could say nasty things about! Teddy Roosevelt’s first-born remains the sassiest daughter ever to live in the White House—especially compared with the two Obama girls, who have managed to get through nearly six years in the White House fishbowl without committing, to my knowledge, a single public indiscretion. Even today, some 100-plus years later, Alice’s teenage antics remain decidedly unconventional—and wholly criticizable. During her long life—she died in 1980, age 96—she never apologized or tried in any way to ameliorate them; in fact, as an old lady, she loved to regale visitors to her famous DuPont Circle teas with descriptions of her bad behavior and rebelliousness.

Lauten would have gotten away with calling out Alice’s public lapses. The press covered her closely, as I discovered when I wrote her biography in the mid-1980s. I spent weeks perusing microfilm at the Washingtoniana collection at the D.C. Public Library and I read every one of her letters at the Alice Roosevelt Longworth Collection at the Library of Congress. If reporters or editors had any qualms back then about covering a presidential daughter—as they certainly do today; there is an unwritten rule, rarely broken, to leave White House children out of coverage—the stacks of news clips indicate that they suppressed those reservations. If there was a presidential-imposed zone of privacy erected around Alice, I didn’t find it when I was conducting interviews and research a hundred years after her birth and several years after her death.

Reporters described Alice’s romps and rebellion in vivid detail, often crowding off the front pages TR’s accomplishments; he was McKinley’s vice president, elected in 1900, and became president, in 1901, after McKinley’s assassination. The president and his wife (and Alice's stepmother), First Lady Edith, needed only to open their morning paper to read about Alice—a friend of Edith’s described Alice as “like a young wild animal that had been put into good clothes.” TR, running for a full term in 1904, feared that Alice’s escapades—smoking in public, chewing gum, wearing pants, racing her own car too fast down D.C. streets, sometimes with male passengers and always unchaperoned, placing bets on horses (a news photographer snapped her collecting her winnings from a bookie)—would hurt his reelection chances. As for Edith, she believed that a lady’s name should appear in print only to announce her birth, marriage and death.

Alice, whose own mother died two days after her birth, never felt loved by Edith, who confided to young Alice that her father had tried to give her to his sister to raise. After marrying the widower, Edith would give birth to five children between 1887-97. Alice complained often that she felt like the family’s stepchild; that she longed for attention from her father and, when she didn’t get it, acted out to force him to pay her heed. As for her stepmother, the two had a cold and sometimes ugly relationship. Edith was staunchly religious; Alice, a self-described “pagan” who ridiculed Christian dogma as “sheer voodoo.” Early on, Edith could fix an icy stare at Alice to force her to behave, but the technique stopped working because, as she grew older, Alice recognized that the discipline was not girded with love. So she did the opposite of what Edith wanted her to.

By age 14, Edith had taken to calling her stepdaughter a “guttersnipe” who ran the streets “uncontrolled with every boy in town.” At age 15, Alice refused to be confirmed or to be shipped off, as her parents planned, to Miss Spence’s school in Manhattan. Alice threatened that if they forced her to go, “I should do something disgraceful.” Her younger half-sister Ethel would later observe that the family considered Alice “a hellion, …capable of doing almost anything to anyone at any time.”

Town Topics, a gossip sheet, covered Alice, starting at age 16, as she caroused with the sons and daughters of the Four Hundred at their “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island, partying on the Vanderbilts’ private railroad car, befriending Mary Harriman, whose father, E.H., was one of the “malefactors of great wealth” whom the young trust-busting president was trying to regulate. While visiting friends in Newport, Alice received a letter from her father, so angry that it “scorched the paper on which it was written.” Her response was to burn the letter.

Daily newspapers reported that Alice stood on a railroad platform with a boa constrictor wrapped around her neck, that she had been asked to leave Boston’s Copley Plaza for smoking in the lobby. Reporters covered Alice as if she, not her father, had just become president; her name—“Princess Alice” she was called—and reputation ran amok over front pages in D.C., New York and around the country. In a cartoon drawn by the Chicago Tribune’s John McCutcheon, Alice is depicted at a “horse show” at which throngs of spectators, judges, and even the horses themselves peer at Alice in her box while the band plays, “Alice, Where Art Thou?”

Often her antics appeared designed to gain attention, perhaps from no one more than her father. At the Library of Congress, I paged through the diary Alice kept during her sad White House years: “Father doesn’t care for me, that is to say one-eighth as much as he does for the other children,” she wrote. Ink smudges mar many of the pages, and I imagined they resulted from Alice’s tears dropping on the pages as she wrote, “I pray for a fortune. I care for nothing except to amuse myself in a charmingly expensive way.”