Daring (40 page)

It was Milton Glaser who presided as the family rabbi to give a homily on marriage. The thrust of his message has stayed with me. He asked the guests to consider their own marriages, to dismiss their grievances and renew their own vows. “Let's see new hope in this marriage,” he said. “And let's give it our full approval. That, as much as a religious blessing, will seal the vows of Clay and Gail, in the presence of their two daughters.”

I could hardly keep my eyes off the two girls who stood to make their own poignant toasts about what this marriage meant to them. One from the West with her pearly skin and fiery Irish red hair, one from the East with her amber skin and demure lowered eyes—they were the angels who had brought us together. They were the meaning in this day. Seeing Maura and Mohm side by side, I felt a shiver of ecstasy. This was the family for which I had longed for so many years. This was the happiest moment of my life.

FORTY-SEVEN. A POPULAR AGE
for a midlife crisis. Not for me. I had been there and done that back in my midthirties, when the violence of Bloody Sunday plunged me into a premature mortality crisis. By the time I turned forty-seven, I was ready to dare to reach for new life in every dimension. Finding the courage to marry the love of my life and create a new family was the culmination of a long passage through the fear of intimacy. From the start, our marriage brought me happiness beyond my imagination. But that very same year, 1984, when I turned forty-seven, I was also offered an open door to a brand-new career direction.

The catalyst was Tina Brown. She was only thirty, an ambitious English editor with one magazine success behind her. Condé Nast had turned to her in desperation to revive one of its most storied publications, V
anity Fair
, a romantic title from the 1930s. Two other editors had tried and failed; circulation and advertising were virtually nil. Newly arrived in New York in January with all the arrogance of youth, Brown thought she could give
Vanity Fair
new life by analyzing American culture through its class divisions. But this was not Britain. Americans don't like to acknowledge our class divisions.

To revive
Vanity Fair
was a much more daunting project than Brown had thought. She asked to have lunch with Walter Anderson, a protégé of Clay's. The hard-driving marine was transforming the Sunday magazine supplement
Parade
into a hot property for Condé Nast, bringing in serious writers like David Halberstam and Norman Mailer. I was lucky to be one of his writers. Anderson told Brown she needed a hard-nosed reporter with a name who could write about politics.

“I don't want the pedestrian political stuff that you see in Metro sections,” she told Anderson. He recommended me as the kind of literary journalist she needed. Brown was familiar with my writing but only in connection with
Passages
. “Would she be interested in writing politics?”

“If you really want human-interest stuff in politics, Gail's your girl,” she remembers being advised. Such is the power of networking.

Brown called me out of the blue on March 12, 1984. I had written a sum total of three political profiles thus far in my career: the Bobby Kennedy story for
New York
, Anwar Sadat for
Esquire
, and a profile for
Parade
of Cory Aquino, the shy wife of an assassinated candidate for the presidency of the Philippines. I had followed her as she stunned the country by leading a revolution and ascending as the first woman to the presidency. Brown would be taking as big a chance on me as I would be in writing for a magazine that hadn't found its legs.

When we met in the Condé Nast building, then on Madison Avenue, I was startled by how much Tina Brown resembled Princess Diana, with her youthful beauty and tousled blond hair. The resemblance ended there. Brown fixed me with her steely blue-eyed intensity and talked at the speed of a fast-forwarded tape. Her restless energy was infectious. She told me she liked a high-low approach to the news, with the flash of celebrities, glamour, and crime to balance highbrow culture and serious investigatory journalism. Could I write humanized political profiles? Could I! I told her I'd love to experiment with using my psychological approach to probe the character of political figures.

“Great! Find out who Gary Hart really is, can you?” We were on the same wavelength from the start. She gave me a month to do the story.

It was a presidential election year, 1984, and Hart was the most tantalizing challenge. A Colorado senator whose campaign had been virtually ignored for a year, Hart had just burst onto the national stage in February with his upset victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. He was the Gentleman Caller of American politics—the illusory romantic figure with “new ideas”—who shocked the political establishment and the media by beating the old guard, Vice President Walter Mondale. Hart himself had been quoted as saying, “I'm an obscure man, and I intend to remain that way. I never reveal who I really am.” The mystery became all the more intriguing as I heard the same refrain in preliminary interviews with his political associates: “When you find out who Gary Hart is, let me know.”

The traveling press was tracking his daily public appearances. Expert political analysts were already dissecting the issues. But research had shown that in presidential elections, most people were not voting on issues. They were voting on character. And the importance of character was something I had done a lot of thinking and reading about, starting with Plutarch's
Lives
and Arnold Toynbee's
A Study of History
(a twelve-volume magnum opus I only grazed to get the gist of his model, tracing the stages of development and decay of all the major world civilizations).

The study of character, as I see it, starts with placing the individual in his or her subculture; for that, I had the tools of social anthropology from my studies with Margaret Mead. Then I would trace his or her development through each stage of life, looking for the pivotal turning points and threads of experience that form a pattern of behavior. My fascination with character, I surmised, might be shared by Americans who had bought one president after another for neatly packaged virtues they turned out not to have. The “new” Nixon. Lyndon “the peacemaker.” The “competent” Carter who pledged to eliminate federal deficits but allowed interest rates to skyrocket, inflation to explode to 12 percent, and unemployment to climb to 7.7 percent, close to the disastrous numbers of Americans thrown out of work by the 2008 global financial crisis.

As always, I started by interviewing all around my subject, usually compiling a list of about forty sources—parents, if living; siblings, a must; the family housekeeper, childhood friends, coaches, the pivotal teacher, the religious guide, the first love, the spouse, the early political staff. It always surprises me how much I can learn from the underlings who worked for the candidate when he or she was a nobody: Could he connect with people? Whom did he listen to? Was he seriously concerned with helping people or full of himself?

My first clue to Hart's character was revealed in April in the back of the chartered plane. He had been virtually sealed in the plane for two months since his win in New Hampshire. Both he and his wife were suffering from a honking bronchitis. Lee Hart kept trying to cuddle up on the armrest next to her husband. He ignored her. She struggled to lift the armrest and back her hip close to his. He was oblivious, talking issues. No one could get close to Gary Hart. Not his wife, not even his own closest Senate staffers. They told me how, when they all huddled with Hart late at night to mark up a bill, he would suddenly command, “Back off!” What was he hiding?

When Hart walked back to the press section, there wasn't a wrinkle in his fitted western shirt. The only sign of campaign wear and tear was in the run-down heels of his cowboy boots—a man as controlled physically as he was emotionally.

I dropped a name: Marilyn Youngbird.

“Do you know Marilyn?” Suddenly his voice was buoyant. “She's been my spiritual adviser for the last few years.”

My jaw must have literally dropped. The mysterious Marilyn was a full-blooded Native American introduced to me by a campaign staffer. Marilyn had assured me that she was Hart's closest friend, a soul mate. She had described in vivid detail their peak moment at an Indian ceremony that had brought them close both personally and spiritually: a Comanche powwow in a Denver park.

“It was so romantic,” she said. “They brushed the front and back of our bodies with eagle feathers. It was sensual. He would look at me, smiling from ear to ear. We didn't know whether to laugh or cry.”

I had been certain this was merely the wishful memory of a lonely female supporter who became infatuated with a handsome presidential candidate and wildly exaggerated her importance to him. Now, I wondered.

“Marilyn asked me to tell you that you should take time for a spiritual-healing ceremony,” I reported.

“I know.” Hart sighed. “Marilyn's been telling me for a long time I need a spiritual purification.”

Suddenly I remembered the note Marilyn had given me to pass on to Hart. When she'd shown me the contents, I thought I would never have the nerve to hand it to a serious man running for the most serious office in the land. But Hart was eager to read it.

Get away from everybody. Go to nature. Hug a tree.

What was more, Marilyn had told me that her parents, both medicine people, had heard the prophecy. The Great Spirit, their god, had chosen Gary Hart to save nature from destruction. I repeated the prophecy for Hart.

“I know,” he said gravely. “She keeps telling me that.”

“Do you believe it?”

“Yes.”

He wasn't kidding. This was a man with an unusually serious case of grandiosity. When his own words were reported in my first
Vanity Fair
story that July, “The Hidden Hart,” the candidate's immediate reaction was to charge: “It's terribly inaccurate journalism.” This was the first evidence of what we all later learned was Hart's knee-jerk reaction to being caught at anything. Lie first, then blame others.

Fortunately for both journalists and voters, lying stirs plenty of media attention.
Time
and
Newsweek
both called me to ask how could I back up what I had written. It was the first time my veracity had been challenged. Hart's people would stop at nothing to discredit me. Suddenly, all the work I had put into this story had led to me to a cliff, over which I might lose my career. I invited editors from both magazines to listen to my audiotapes. They were satisfied. Walter Mondale's campaign backed away from any interest in Hart as a running mate and began dropping references in news stories to “the flake factor.”

Tina was thrilled. “You knocked it out of the park!”

IN
1987,
AS CANDIDATES BEGAN
lining up to run as the successor to President Ronald Reagan in the 1988 election, Tina was on the phone with an urgent assignment: this time she wanted me to write a whole series of character portraits. I had no hesitation about taking up her offer, but it was a risk. The more successful you are, the harder it becomes to walk the plank. More people notice and more sharks start circling in the water. Still fresh in my mind were the attacks I had received at the '84 Democratic Convention from some well-respected, classical male profile writers—a few of them personal friends.

“How dare you?” said one, suggesting that I was to blame for dooming Hart's chances of being on the Democratic ticket.

“Would you trust me as a journalist if I backed away from what I'd learned, to avoid controversy?” I replied. No response.

I had to have confidence that when trying out a new form, in any field, one must expect a backlash from top practitioners of the currently accepted form. I was an upstart, and a woman journalist to boot.

My defense was simple. “Issues are today. Character is what was yesterday and will be tomorrow.”

I was convinced that in Hart's second presidential race, it was not a question of
if
he would destroy himself, but of
when
. This time, I traveled through the various worlds of Gary Hart and found a tortured and divided man.

Hart was shaped—one might even say malformed—by a highly punitive fundamentalist religious sect. The Church of the Nazarene forbade all sentient pleasures—no dancing, no movies, no listening to the radio, and of course no drinking or unmarried sex. Young Gary had to hang around outside the movie house and ask his friends to tell him what they saw. His mother drilled into the boy her own dark, evangelical beliefs: that man is born with a sinful nature and his appetites must “continue to be controlled” by “putting to death the deeds of the body.” Compulsive about cleanliness, his mother moved the family to sixteen different houses before Gary finished high school. He went on to Bethany Nazarene College.

“You do everything right, you go with a girl, you get married,” he told a friend, Tom Boyd, “then six months later you wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself, ‘My God, what have I done?'”

Hart admitted to me, “The one Protestant quality I suppose I've got my share of is guilt.” His pastor, whom I met, had made certain that guilt would follow him forever. The Reverend Earl Copsey told me that Gary Hartpence (his real name; he changed it because his classmates called him “hotpants”) was a dead soul as far as the church was concerned. The pastor remembered the exact date on which that death occurred, September 20, 1968—“he left the church to go back out to the world of sin.” Soon, Hart would abandon his wife and family and his new law practice and volunteer to work for a near-hopeless cause called the McGovern campaign. And there he met the man in whose image he remade himself, Warren Beatty, the sybarite who introduced him to guiltless philandering.