The Chameleon (57 page)

Suddenly Fenwick Grant couldn't remember.

“Patience,” he called after her. “I just remembered. Her name is Patience.” There was a wolfish grin on his lips as he watched the way her back curved into her narrow hips.

But Claire was already on her way. She had lovingly nursed dear Lefty night and day for two years. She was forty-two years old and there was an open seat in Congress for which she had two days left to file and announce. Now she had neither time nor patience.

On her way early the next morning to the chrome-and-green-glass headquarters of Grant Publications, Claire thought how proud Lefty would be of her. She whirled herself through the revolving doors of the imposingly ugly building. Last night she had made her pact with power, brokered a calculated peace with the press, sold the Chagall for her campaign chest, and scheduled a lunch with California's influential Senator Bostwick. All between cocktails and dessert. She had one thing left to do. Her high heels resonated with authority on the speckled marble floor. In an effort to blend in with the Washington crowd, she hadn't accessorized her severely cut business suit with anything except white gloves and Lefty's pearls. Still, she could tell from the newsroom stares that her demeanor was still more Bel Air than Beltway, as if her shiny Hollywood veneer couldn't be scrubbed away overnight.

She followed the explicit directions Grant's secretary had given her to the labyrinthine newsroom with its vast expanse of desks all topped by ringing telephones and whirring typewriters. There in the center of it all she found a red-faced Anita Lace angrily emptying out the messy contents of her desk drawers and muttering under her breath. Her short gray-and-brown hair bristled around her square head. She wore half-glasses hanging from her neck on a plastic lavaliere, and was skinny everywhere except around her ankles. Claire was reminded of the loyal battalions of humorless, thick-necked women in Eleanor's army. When Anita looked up and saw Claire standing over her she hurled a few spicy expletives before she went back to collecting her clutter.

“Come to gloat, have you?”

“No. Actually, I hear you might be in the market for a job. I thought I might employ you.”

“You bitch. I don't do social secretary stuff. I ought to thank you. Maybe now I can go back to politics,” she mumbled, a cigarette dangling from her dry lips.

“That's exactly what I had in mind. I'm running for the House of Representatives. Hathaway's seat. And I need the savviest press secretary around. Someone who's not afraid to talk back to me.”

“After what I've done to you?”

Lefty's words rumbled through Claire's mind: “Get the press, Toots, before they get you. Bring out your own skeletons—they're less interesting if you clean out your own closet!”

“Yes, Anita. You know the facts. You certainly know how to misrepresent them. And you were the best war reporter around until you started your social skullduggery.”

It was hard to tell if the red flush on Anita's face was from embarrassment or some oxygen deprivation caused by trying to light a fresh cigarette while hanging her head down in a deep drawer to remove her things.

“But I butchered you.”

“So you can butcher my opponent. Furthermore, you'll be able to anticipate the worst they could print about me and deflect it. But I shall expect and demand absolute loyalty from you.” She leaned down to ignite Anita's dangling cigarette. “We'll play war, Anita, but we can win and make a difference. I never took what you wrote about me personally. You only put Ophelia's vitriol into colorful sentences.” A fleeting look of remembered sorrow crossed Claire's face.

“I want to make sure divorced mothers don't lose custody of their children just because they're poor. Like I almost did before I moved to Italy. Anita, I want to make children's rights a real issue. Along with day care and affordable health care for families with catastrophic illnesses. Like cancer.” An impassioned Claire continued even as she brought her voice to a lower pitch. “You know, the feminists are just discovering what my aunties have always known. That women pulling together leads to women's power.”

Anita perked up. She had been born a liberal Democrat.

And then Claire closed her deal with what she hoped would be the clincher. “I want to make certain women get equal pay for equal work. And I'll make damn sure good writers don't get demoted just because they're women.” She watched as the thought sparked Anita's attention. “Of course, you'll be my speechwriter, too. Let's take on the big boys.”

It was as if Anita were a middle-aged Cinderella finally getting invited to the palace. “My gawd. You're the glam Eleanor.”

She stretched out her nail-bitten hand to Claire, her fingers black with typewriter ribbon. “So if we get you elected I'll be press secretary. Right?”

“Absolutely.”

Anita slammed the desk drawer. She wouldn't be needing the phone numbers of chatty hotel concierges and maître d's, her trusty spies for her social column, anymore. If Claire won, Anita could call her own shots from the hallowed marbled halls on Capitol Hill. As Congressman Glam's press secretary. Or chief of staff. Who knew where this thing might go?

“So, Mrs. Lefkowitz, where do we begin?”

“We're going to write my announcement speech. It will be televised throughout the state. The power of television is politically underutilized. I think I understand the medium.” She linked her arm through Anita's as she led the elfin woman down the hall to Grant's office and caused a commotion, shutting down the Smith Coronas in the city newsroom. The Poison Pen and her most maligned victim nodded in sync, separated by a good five inches in height but somehow with their heads huddled together.

“Incidentally, I'm going back to my Washington roots.”

The social scribe, caught off balance, crankily pointed a finger toward Claire's scalp. “What roots?”

“Oh, not my hair.” Claire caught her drift. “Just my name. I'm Claire Harrison again. It's simpler to remember.”

“And it's probably the most famous political name in America.” Anita marveled at both Claire's political savvy and her guts.

“It's the name I share with my daughter.”

“Oh, right. Will she come out for you?” Anita vividly remembered being instructed by Ophelia not to cover Sara's electroshock treatments and Claire's constant efforts to get help for her daughter, who had been relegated to the side shadows by the grandmother. She hadn't spoken to the old witch in years, but she'd heard that Ophelia had gone nuts herself when Sara had refused to attend the Tuxedo Hunt Ball on the arm of Edward Langley. Young Langley, of the Baltimore Langleys, had been in Sara's “class” at Wolford for shooting the family's house cats. “Is she still bonkers?”

Claire bristled at the question.

“Thought so. See? That's your weak spot. We'll have to work on your reaction. Reporters will ask you that.” She tugged on an unadorned earlobe. “Will Sara be campaigning for you?”

Claire composed herself. “Well, she's busy with her own life. She's getting married.”

“What?” Anita's rubber soles skidded to a stop. She had thought the kid was too crazy to marry. “Oh. I get it. Something you arranged. Some blue-blood schnook who wants to marry into the family. And Sara gets a love life. Good idea. America loves weddings.”

“Then they'll be disappointed. The young man is a poetry teacher. He's very nice. But the baby will be born soon after the wedding.”

She delivered the line calmly, but the hawk-eyed Anita could see her distress.

“Yeah, I get it. Maybe she should just work the phone bank. Any more surprises?”

“Just me.”

Anita wondered if the family thing might be a campaign obstacle. This certainly wasn't Beaver and Mrs. Cleaver. Not to mention those damn good looks of Claire's.

“How do you get along with Mrs. Average America? You know, will other gals vote for you?”

“I'm a gal.”

Amazed, Anita scratched some dandruff out of her hair and wondered what kind of speech would catapult Claire Harrison—“Why don't you all just forget about the Duccio years and leave out the Lefkowitz?”—into the hearts of the California voters.

“When is this speech scheduled?”

“Sunday. Right after
The Wonderful World of Disney.
”

“How the hell did you get the Sunday prime spot?”

“Oh, I called a friend at Desilu.”

Anita smiled. The glam Eleanor knew how to play with power. She had come a long way since Anita had been hired to hack away at the victimized fashion plate.

“Well, your family
has
to be there. American women without families on the podium are suspect.”

“But I've just been widowed.”

“In that case, people will expect you to stay at home.”

“I can't. I want to run. I promised Lefty.”

“Shit” Anita coughed. “Divorced, double widow, with an off-the-wall kid, running for your United States Representative. Just what middle America is pining for.”

“I've got my war years record. The State Department liaison work under Harrison. Eleanor House. Co-owner of a film and television agency. Two state educational review boards—”

Speargun murderer, thought Anita. Had
that
been analyzed in a poll? “Well, it's not exactly like you won the Purple Heart.”

“Trust me, Anita. We can do it. You're the toughest and the best. Why don't you go pack up your things and be ready by four?” She called over her slim shoulder, “We're flying back to L.A. and getting down to work. How do you like that slogan? ‘Women getting down to work.’ Oh, it reminds me. While I'm in with Grant, why don't you get that new group, the National Organization for Women, to endorse me. Good idea?” And then Claire threw in the Lefty clincher, Lefty-style: “Right, Toots? We're all broads under the skin.”

Anita stood in the hall, shaking her head and wondering if trying to get Claire Harrison elected was some sort of divine punishment for having ground the woman into the mud. But she liked the smooth way Claire had reeled her in. Not demoting top gun reporters to the society beat just because they were women. Anita was hooked.

“Yeah, sure, I'm in,” she snapped. She stood there in her mannish, putty-colored suit and ground a cigarette into the elevator ash can with her fist. Power to the broads.

Anita couldn't believe it when Shirley Temple Black, who had been appointed U.N. ambassador earlier in the year, agreed to stand beside Claire on the podium. The gruff press secretary pedaled her feet as fast as she could to keep up with Claire, quizzing her as she ran alongside.

“How were you able to pull that off?”

Claire simply grinned and whispered, “Marshall Field's and Company,” as if it had been a clearinghouse for the world's most powerful women instead of a giant department store.

“Well, other than the fact that she's a Republican and tap-danced on film with a man who played her black slave, it's peachy.”

Anita still couldn't figure what to do with the fashion part of Claire's life. There were so many portraits of her still reprinted in
Vogue
and
Town and Country
wearing haute couture creations and far-away expressions that it was as if Claire were running not against her opponent, but her old image. “For God's sake, if they ask you about Johnson's Great Society remember it's not some big bash you attended.

“And watch you don't tumble on the q-and-a. Good God, there are so many questions the reporters could trip you up on. We're not ready yet!” They were only a few yards from the podium and the plunge into public scrutiny.

“Gracious, Anita, I'm only running for Congress, not the pope's wife.”

“But that's just the point. You've been
everybody's
wife.”

“Not everybody's.” Anita Lace, ace reporter, thought she heard a twinge of regret in the candidate's voice just before it deepened into a bell-like ring of distinction and she ascended the platform. “I am running as my own woman. Now.”

Shirley Temple Black delivered a bright-eyed introduction, and Claire, remembering to sparkle, threw her Halston hat into the ring.

It didn't hurt when her Republican opponent. Bill Strudel, was labeled by Grant's Los Angeles newspaper as “Mr. Milquetoast,” but Claire still was trailing him miserably in the polls. In newspapers other than Grant's she was still relegated to the entertainment pages or society news—one photo of Claire opening a preschool day-care center in central L.A. where hot lunches would be served ran in the food section—while, as state's attorney, Bill Strudel's daily pronouncements on parking meters or redwood trees were reported on page one. She needed to break out of her old mold, become a tough political chameleon, one who could survive the land-mined terrain of electoral politics and fit in with the good old boys.

She worked her “small crowds,” as Anita referred to the handful of women who turned out to meet the candidate at high teas and shopping centers. She'd stand at a bus stop for hours, speaking through a megaphone or shaking hands with passersby. Occasionally someone asked her if she was waiting for the uptown express.

But little by little she started to do better in the shopping centers. As a child reared in the do-without Depression, a former shop girl, and an enforced penny-pincher during the nonworking years as Lefty's nurse, she knew the price of milk and eggs, medicines, as well as Tide detergent and Dial soap.

“Hey, Claire, ever been in a grocery store like the rest of us?” one loudmouthed heckler shouted out to her in front of Claire's station wagon while they were passing out buttons and pamphlets from the tailgate. These were always the ones who asked her to autograph a veiled Claire Duccio photo or her Irving Penn portrait from
U.S. Week
or
Life.

“You bet. I do all my own grocery shopping.”

“Well, how much does caviar cost these days?” The heckler leaned back on her sandals and let her words carry into the group, causing a stirring of giggles.

The bored
LA. Times
cub political reporter grudgingly sent out to cover Claire that day poised his pen over his pad and started listening. He already had his headline: “Claire on Caviar: The Party Girl's Campaign for Congress.” He waited for her to flesh out his comic-relief story.