A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  On at least one occasion, Madelyn seemed to suggest that she had taken the name from the southern belle in the movie that just six months earlier had signaled the transformation in Bette Davis’s image on-screen. When asked about the name not long after Stanley Ann’s birth, Madelyn said cryptically, “You know, Bette Davis played a character named Stanley.”

  Two

  Coming of Age in Seattle

  It wasn’t easy to be a girl named Stanley growing up in the wake of a restless father. By her fourteenth birthday, Stanley Ann had moved more often than many Americans in those days moved in a lifetime. At age two, she had moved from Kansas to California, where Stanley Dunham spent two years as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley; then she had moved from California back to Kansas, where, after dropping out of Berkeley, her father signed up for a couple of courses at the University of Wichita; from Kansas to Ponca City, Oklahoma, where he worked as a furniture salesman; from Ponca City to Texas, to sell furniture again; from Texas back to El Dorado; from El Dorado to Seattle; and from Seattle to Mercer Island, Washington, where the family touched down for four years before heading westward once again, this time to Hawaii, where Stanley and Madelyn finally settled. By the time Stanley Ann entered Mercer Island High School as a thirteen-year-old freshman in the fall of 1956, she was accustomed to being the outsider and the perpetual other. She had some of the attributes of children of peripatetic parents: She was adaptable and self-sufficient. Experienced in the art of introducing herself, she had developed a preemptive response to the inevitable follow-up question. “I’m Stanley,” she would say. “My father wanted a son, but he got me.” The retort, true or not, revealed something about the speaker. By the time she was a teenager, Stanley Ann was witty and self-contained, with a wry sense of humor. She had other outsider qualities: She was curious about people, and she was tolerant, not leaping to judgment. She had an unusual capacity even as a child, Charles Payne told me, to laugh at herself. She also had a contentious relationship with her father. She had figured out early on how to get under his skin.

  Madelyn, Stanley Ann, and Ralph Dunham, Yellowstone National Park, summer 1947

  Physically, she resembled him. She had his elongated chin, his compact mouth, his enviable hair. As a child, she was somewhat ungainly, an asthmatic in a household of smokers. As a teenager, she came to loathe the indignities and the regimentation of high school gym. She lacked the makings of an athlete, but she was bright. When Ralph Dunham was a graduate student in educational psychology at UC Berkeley and living in student housing in Richmond, California, with his brother as well as Madelyn and Stanley Ann, he gave his four-year-old niece an intelligence test. “You’re not supposed to give intelligence tests to people you’re related to, but I think I was pretty objective,” he told me. Asked how Stanley Ann did on the test, he said, with visible pride and admiration, “Very well, indeed.” She was curious and lively, with the willfulness of her mother. “She would decide to do something and do it whether anyone wanted her to or not,” Charles Payne said. Until Mercer Island, she was rarely in one place long enough to develop enduring friendships. At a time when little girls were given names like Mary, Betty, and Barbara, Stanley Ann was teased about hers. (She wished she had been named Deborah, she told Maya years later.) She was solitary and bookish, inclined to hole up for hours with back issues of National Geographic, “always traveling in her mind,” as Maya put it. She was independent-minded—though not so much so as to be spared the anxieties of adolescence and the yearning to fit in. As a teenager, she was self-conscious about her appearance; the year she had braces, one friend said, she rarely risked a smile. She had an eye for absurdity and little tolerance for phoniness and glibness. Her humor was arch, sometimes cutting, but not mean-spirited. A look of wry amusement was often on her face. Toward the back of the 1960 Mercer Island High School annual, there is a snapshot of Stanley Ann and a classmate, Marilyn McMeekin, soliciting a yearbook ad from Petram’s Ten Cent Store. Marilyn has presented herself, front and center, next to the cash register and the wire rack of Wrigley’s gum. She is smiling eagerly, engaging a cashier somewhere outside the frame. In the background, slightly out of focus, Stanley Ann has been captured by the camera, visibly rolling her eyes. She was good at rolling her eyes, her high school friend John Hunt told me.

  Her father, Stanley, struck his daughter’s friends as jovial, boisterous, a talker. He could be charming and loud, and his humor often involved teasing. Compared with other Mercer Island parents, he and Madelyn seemed, at least to some, more adventurous and hip. They were sharp-witted and unconventional, if less educated and more middle class than upper-middle class. Madelyn was the brains in the family, by most accounts, and the reliable breadwinner. But Stanley called at least some of the shots. In his white convertible, he ferried Stanley Ann and her friends to and from high school basketball and football games. Occasionally, he would let some of them take the wheel, sitting in his lap. They enjoyed his attention; he enjoyed theirs. “Eventually, he sort of sucked up all the air in the car,” Susan Botkin Blake, a classmate and friend of Stanley Ann’s, told me. “He was one of those people that, given an audience, he’d take it.” He embarrassed his daughter, not least with his familiarity with her friends. He was strict and overprotective, Ralph Dunham said. Behind his back, to friends who called her Stan, she referred to Stanley half mockingly as “Big Stan.” Kathy Sullivan, a close friend in high school, remembered Stanley Ann glancing at her sideways in Stanley Dunham’s car, out of his view, and making a face. Kathy had her own burden of parental embarrassment. Her mother, who had grown up in a farming community in Illinois, still hung the family’s laundry on a clothesline. She did not appear, to her teenage daughter, to know the right way to talk. Her mother did not fit in on Mercer Island, Kathy felt, and neither did Stanley Ann’s father. It made Kathy feel better that she and Stanley Ann shared these mortifications. “Stanley hated her father at the time that I knew her,” she told me. “She hated her father as only a teenager can hate.”

  Both the time and the geography of the place shaped the experience of coming of age on Mercer Island in the latter half of the 1950s. When the Dunhams arrived in 1956, Mercer Island was almost rural—a 6.2-square-mile slab of wooded land, the shape of a steak, just east of Seattle in Lake Washington. The population was about eight thousand, mostly scattered along the perimeter in handsome waterfront houses and more modest wood-frame cottages. Everyone, just about, was white. Classmates of Stanley Ann’s remembered one black student in the entire high school by the year they graduated. The local paper, the Mercer Island Reporter, was dense with news of Parent-Teacher Association smorgasbords, ballroom dancing classes, and Camp Fire Girls’ “Dad and Daughter” suppers. Ads in the personal section said things like, “Respectable lady interested in forming a card club.” Editorials opined earnestly on topics like “Our Vanishing Morals.” When the high school French teacher, Madame White, escorted a group of students to Europe one summer, the girls boarded the plane in hats, pumps, and white gloves. Crime was almost nonexistent. Children could spend the night in sleeping bags down by the water or disappear into the woods for an entire day. Susan Botkin’s family, she said, did not even have a key to their house. When they went on vacation, her mother would throw the bolt on the front door, set the button lock on the back door on the way out, and leave one clerestory window ajar for her brother to enter through when they returned. The only direct transportation link to Seattle had been a ferry until 1940, when the “floating bridge” between Seattle and the island opened. Roads on the island were tar and gravel. Mercer Island had a small town center, a few stores, little public transportation, no movie theaters, few televisions. “I can remember going with some of my college buddies to Mercer Island. It was almost a feeling that it was a different country,” said Jim Sullivan, who would drive his Alfa Romeo convertible from the University of Washington across the pontoon bridge to pick up his girlfriend, Kathy Powell, Stanley Ann’s friend.
“There were a lot of subtle controls dictated by geography.”

  Yet change was coming. The great postwar suburbanization of America was under way, and the communities east of Seattle in the shadow of the Cascade Mountains were expanding. Boeing, with its airplane-manufacturing site in Renton, Washington, was building up its commercial-airliner division for the jet age. King County was booming. On Mercer Island, bulldozers and cement mixers rumbled along Island Crest Way, the road that traced the island’s backbone like a zipper. The first big apartment complex opened in 1949, and subdivisions followed. Young professionals were moving in, looking for moderately priced housing, good schools, and an easy commute into Seattle. Many were college-educated, successful and affluent, and committed to creating opportunities for their children. “Newcomers’ Club Welcomes Eight Residents,” read a headline on an article in the Mercer Island Reporter that greeted newly arrived women by their husbands’ names: “Mesdames Richard Friedenrich, Paul Hindman,” and so on. Kathy Powell’s father, who moved his family to Mercer Island the year the Dunhams arrived, was a Lockheed engineer turned insurance company manager; her mother had been trained as a nurse. Chip Wall, who had arrived two years earlier, was the son of the commanding officer of a Nike missile battalion that was setting up a missile perimeter defense for Seattle; his mother had gone to stenography school. Susan Botkin’s mother was sent west from Missouri by the Girl Scouts organization, Susan told me, to research how to develop scouting in the area. Beyond Mercer Island, the civil rights movement had begun, the birth-control pill was in development, and John F. Kennedy would announce on January 2, 1960, that he was running for president. “There was change in the air,” recalled Bill Byers, a classmate and friend of Stanley Ann’s. “And we felt it in high school. We didn’t know what we were feeling. But that was at the end of the Eisenhower years, and everything was so extremely stable. It was just too quiet. And young people can’t stand it when it gets too quiet.”

  Mercer Island High School had all the energy and ambition of a brand-new school. Until the mid-1950s, there had been no high school on the island; students had commuted to Bellevue or Seattle. The class of 1958 was the first to graduate from the new school, which sprang up among the Douglas firs near the new subdivision, Mercerwood, close to the center of the island. The faculty tended to be young and committed. “Everything was fresh, everybody wanted to work hard, all the parents wanted it to be good,” said Jim Wichterman, who arrived in the mid-1950s as a part-time social studies teacher and football and track coach. “It was just, ‘Let’s have a good educational system.’” Maxine Hanson Box, a close friend of Stanley Ann’s who went on to teach elementary school in Bellevue and Renton for twenty-seven years, told me the Mercer Island High School curriculum was conceived to be challenging. At the time, individual school districts could raise money from local taxpayers to raise teachers’ salaries and build facilities, and Mercer Island taxpayers enthusiastically went along. Parents turned out in force for back-to-school nights. They organized graduation parties and knew whose children had gotten into Harvard. The newspaper carried articles about the latest National Merit semifinalists. Maxine’s parents, whose own education had been cut short by the Depression, moved to Mercer Island in 1957 in part for the schools. Like other parents on Mercer Island, they made their expectations clear to their children. “You would do your very best, and you would accept a challenge and do the work to get there,” Maxine Box told me. “It made a lot of difference to where the kids applied to go to school, and it broadened their horizons about what they could be. There were no limits.”

  The Dunhams moved into the Shorewood Apartments before school started in 1956. The first large rental apartment complex on the island, it had opened seven years earlier, designed for middle-class living. Two- and three-story brick and wood-trimmed apartment houses stood on broad lawns sloping down to a meandering private waterfront. The apartments had hardwood floors, crown molding, and views of the Cascades. Front doors opened directly onto lawns. The complex had its own tennis courts, community center, and convenience store. In the two years after Shorewood opened, school enrollment on Mercer Island nearly quadrupled. Newcomers to the island, waiting for houses to be completed, touched down in Shorewood. So did ex-spouses digging out from the rubble of wrecked marriages. Most families on Mercer Island lived in single-family houses—from bungalows and split-level duplexes to waterfront homes where a button embedded in the floor under the dining room table would summon the maid. But Shorewood had its own attractions, including plenty of children. From the Dunhams’ two-bedroom apartment on East Lexington Way, it was a short walk to 90th Avenue SE and across SE 40th Street to Mercer Island High School. Chip Wall, a friend of Stanley Ann’s, lived in Shorewood. Steve McCord, another friend, lived in a house in the trees near the footbridge connecting Lower and Upper Shorewood. Maxine Hanson lived in Mercerwood, three blocks from school. Like most Mercer Island mothers, Maxine’s did not work, so Stanley Ann would often go home with Maxine after school. “I’ll never forget your mother’s chocolate cake,” Stanley Ann wrote on the back of a wallet-size copy of her tenth-grade school photo that she gave to Maxine. “Love + luck, Stanley.”

  They had met on Maxine’s first day at the school, in September 1957, at the welcoming assembly in the gym. In the Mercer Island pecking order, the popular boys tended to be star athletes. They dressed well, had ski boats, and were inclined not to speak up in class. The popular girls were good-looking and svelte, and wore pleated wool skirts and twinsets. Brains were not necessarily a liability. There was a group of smart and funny boys—self-styled intellectuals at odds, albeit ambivalently, with the dominant high school culture—who read books outside the curriculum and assumed that most athletes were morons. One of them, Bill Byers, went on to be voted most likely to succeed. Another, Chip Wall, was voted most talented. Stanley Ann’s friends were not easily pigeonholed, but they were more outsiders than insiders. They called her Stanley. On that day in 1957, she was sitting with a group of girls (seven of whom would still be eating dinner together monthly some fifty years later). They invited Maxine to join them—a gesture she told me might not have been unrelated to the fact that her older brother, Bill, was six-foot-nine and destined for basketball stardom. “Stanley had only been here a year before me, so she knew what it was like to be a new person at school,” Box remembered. “I think that’s one of the reasons that we got to know each other so quickly. I can remember Stanley laughing when she introduced herself and said her name was Stanley. And right then she said, ‘My father wanted a son.’”

  Laughed how? I asked.

  “Well, how you would laugh at yourself when you weren’t ashamed of anything,” she said.

  Stanley Ann’s humor was quick, dry, and ironic. The future anthropologist was a participant-observer of the culture of the high school and of its denizens’ foibles. Her sense of humor, Chip Wall said, was in the spirit of Peter Sellers and The Goon Show. She found things funny that other people simply missed. She could be sarcastic and snide, and had a particular disdain for classmates piping the opinions of their parents. Iona Stenhouse, a classmate, described Stanley Ann’s sensibility as a “can-you-believe-this? perspective.” She was direct. “She would call our bluff, our intellectual pretense,” John Hunt said. “That’s the way she was—blunt.” She was young for her class—more mature intellectually than socially, more confident of her brains than of her appearance. She had what Steve McCord called a slightly regal bearing: Quiet and composed, she held her chin a half-notch higher than most. She wore the pleated or gored skirts and blouses that were de rigueur, but could resist the impulse to upgrade to high-status brands. “She would probably laugh at me and say, ‘Sixty dollars for a skirt?’” said Kathy Powell, who squandered her earnings from her weekend job at the Pancake Corral in Bellevue on Evan Picone skirts. Steve McCord said, “She was not a gum-chewing, blinky-eyed bimbo, a Mercer Island cashmere-sweater-wearing social dingdong.” To him, she seemed nonjudgmental and down
-to-earth. She was one of the few friends to whom McCord, a year older and a friend from French club, was comfortable confiding his growing realization that he was gay—a fact of his life that, he said, his loyal, devoted parents believed could be cured. In the company of people she did not know well, Stanley Ann was reticent and loath to call attention to herself. Among friends, she was lively and more outgoing. She kept a low profile in class, but when ideas moved her, she spoke her mind. There was a seriousness about her that made Jim Wichterman, the social studies teacher, remember her a half-century later. She seemed interested in the material, interested in ideas. Neither overtly rebellious nor a joiner, she found her way eventually into that mostly male circle of academically high-achieving nonconformists outside of the force field that surrounded the star athletes. “There was this constant tension in her life,” Susan Botkin Blake told me. “It was this sense of needing to fit in and yet be apart.”

  There were slumber parties, sock hops, ski trips, little drinking, no drugs, little dating, less sex. If there was any sex education in the school, no one I spoke with seemed to remember it years later. Maxine Box said that the students who had been on Mercer Island in middle school “had been told by a teacher, ‘If you ever sit on a boy’s lap, be sure to sit on a newspaper.’” Parking with your boyfriend and “petting” could lead to other things, girls were told. But who knew what those were? Talking to strangers was said to be risky, but what those risks were went undeclared. It was difficult to talk with your mother about sex, and many girls did not have their first appointment with a gynecologist until they were eighteen or older—or married. It would be another year or two before the birth-control pill was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and many more before it was widely available in places such as college campuses. The only form of birth control teenagers seemed to know about was the condom. One of the brothers who owned the gas station where Bill Byers had an after-school job bought condoms on behalf of young employees, striding out of the pharmacy with a ribbon of condom packets over his shoulder like a bandolier, intending to be shocking. A Mercer Island girl unlucky enough to become pregnant before graduation faced an unhappy fate: Some disappeared abruptly, shipped off to live with a relative or to finish school elsewhere in anonymity; others hid their pregnancies, some marrying quietly before graduation. When one good-looking and likable jock impregnated an upperclassman, her sudden disappearance did not escape Stanley Ann and Kathy Powell’s notice. They were shocked, Kathy Powell Sullivan told me, that the girl had to be sent away and that the boy’s family had arranged it. Judy Ware, whose parents were Mercer Island bridge-playing friends of Madelyn and Stanley Dunham’s, told me that she became pregnant in her senior year. An abortion, still against the law and often unsafe, would have required making arrangements through intermediaries. Judy, anxious to please her parents, stalled before telling them she was pregnant. They arranged for her to be married secretly—no siblings, few photographs—some distance from Seattle. She graduated at five months pregnant.