Daring

by Gail Sheehy

  She was still determined to stay in the game. The next morning, a young intern had told me that my mother’s blood gases didn’t look good. “She won’t have any quality of life going forward, so we should think about suspending further treatment.”

  I looked into this callow man’s face. “You don’t know my mother.”

  By the following morning, her blood gases had returned to near normal and she was well enough to go home. The attending physician told me that my mother could be expected to live possibly another year or more. She told me that I should go back to Sag Harbor.

  Our first town meeting attracted 250 people to the community for three days of intense round-table discussions. We were early in addressing the growing divide between haves and have-nots. But on the way to the first evening panel, a phone call from Florida notified me that my mother had died. I was heartsick.

  EARLY IN NOVEMBER I TOLD CLAY, “We’ll have to cancel our Thanksgiving party.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m just so blue about my mother.”

  “What would your mother say?”

  He knew, just as well as I, Mother would never cancel a party. And this party had been conceived as a broadening of the friendships made through the Sag Harbor Initiative. It was to be a Saturday-night soiree on Thanksgiving weekend, a buffet dinner for forty or fifty. Maura and Mohm and I would turn the window-walled living room into a grand café. We picked the last of the mums and arranged them in cornucopias with winter pears and grapes and lady apples on tables draped in green felt. We had great vats of paella cooked up by an Irish caterer, Janet O’Brien, with fresh-caught clams and lobster, chicken and homemade Italian sausage. The last preparation would be to light what looked like a thousand candles once they multiplied their flickering gaiety on the windows.

  The party was a grand reunion. The faces of friends not seen since the end of summer brought forth gusts of pleasure all around. Along with the Pickenses and the Pughs, we got to know Bruce Llewellyn, the Coca-Cola franchise holder in Philadelphia, and his wife, Shahara, a major supporter of Hillary Clinton. Tom Wolfe had just published Bonfire of the Vanities and was the talk of our first party. Paul Davis was painting portraits of world leaders and becoming the toast of Japan. Myrna Davis, along with managing Paul’s studio, was named executive director of the Art Director’s Club. Richard Reeves was becoming a celebrated presidential biographer. His wife, my dear friend, Catherine O’Neill, was on a mission to make our Women’s Refugee Commission an official arm of the United Nations.

  Peter Jennings, then anchor of ABC World News Tonight, appointed himself toastmaster and gave a gentle ribbing to each guest as he lauded their most recent accomplishments. I moved from table to table, ever eager to talk to Bob Caro and his author-wife, Ina, who brought back from Texas startling new revelations about Johnson’s mastery of the Senate. Bob Loomis, the senior Random House editor famous for publishing William Styron, Maya Angelou, and Shelby Foote, as always offered encouragement on what I was working on. A few years later, I would humbly join his tribe and we would do five books together over ten years. Robert Emmett Ginna, the charmingly garrulous Irish American editor, enchanted me and his whole table with stories of writers he had published from the revolutionary playwright Sean O’Casey to the impossible Lillian Hellman.

  Our Thanksgiving soiree became a tradition that enriched our friendships for the next fifteen years. The conversations among that extraordinary circle expanded my thinking.

  As modest as was the Sag Harbor Initiative, it had a long reach. Walter Isaacson, a charter member and, back then, a young political correspondent for Time, never forgot the purpose and format of the Initiative. He ran with the idea years later in a much grander public think tank. As president and CEO of the Aspen Ideas Festival since 2003, Isaacson has used the same template to create the quintessential Olympics of the mind, inviting thought leaders from across the United States and the world to spar over the newest and most pertinent issues of the day.

  CHAPTER 32

  Two Who Changed the World

  IN THE LATE 1980S AND EARLY 1990S, Tina Brown gave me the opportunity to expand my character portraits by writing about leaders who changed the world. I was fascinated by the power symbiosis among Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Ronald Reagan. Of these, the smartest was Britain’s prime minister Thatcher, the catalyst who brokered the relationship between the men who ran the world’s two superpowers. The result would be no less than the end of the Cold War.

  “She has eyes like Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” That memorable description by French president François Mitterrand suggested a fascinating dualism in Thatcher’s nature. I couldn’t wait to go to London and discover more. This was what I loved most about literary journalism. Who could make up a middle-aged right-wing woman leader who possessed the dual character of a domineering male and a seductive female? Who could make people believe that a peasant boy born into famine in a hut in the Russian steppe was destined to lead a country of 290 million people?

  It was early in 1989 when I began studying Thatcher. She was completing her tenth year in office. No one had enjoyed such a political reign over the monarchy in the twentieth century. At home, she had vanquished the opposition, gagged the media, and silenced or sacked the critics in her own party. She was a fearsome force, hell-bent on putting the spine back into an enfeebled Great Britain.

  My first exposure to this force of nature was from the gallery of Parliament where I watched her thrust and parry with her opposition at Question Time. Thatcher’s entrance was unexpectedly deferential. She hunched over and tiptoed in, starkly smart in a black silk suit with a white tuxedo collar, almost a parody of a gentleman’s garb. She sat on the edge of the government’s front bench, fingers threaded through her briefing books, and crossed her legs, confidently displaying her slender knees sheathed in sheer black stockings.

  A debate ensued. Thatcher leaped up to the dispatch box only a few feet from her opponent, mano a mano. Her warmed-milk voice turned quickly to a scald: “Fact is, fact is, fact is . . .” she repeated, refusing to be outshouted until their exchanges became ear-splitting.

  “Order!” shouted the speaker of the House. Sometimes these debates became so rough, the speaker had to call a break for “injury time.” But something other than Thatcher’s voice captured my attention. Her legs. Each time she rocked up from her seat to debate the opposition, she would rub the back of one black-stockinged calf with the toe of her other foot. “She has sexy legs” was a comment I heard from both her devotees and detractors. One of her ambassadors told me that he found Mrs. Thatcher “sexually attractive, in a sort of packaged way.”

  Thatcher, sexy? Friends laughed when I mentioned what I was beginning to find out. The “Iron Lady,” a sobriquet attached to her by the Soviet press, was one she relished—how sexy was that? The supernanny who “hand bagged” the men in her cabinet if they failed her tests of manhood—sexy? Unimaginable! But I remembered Clay telling me that when he was introduced to the PM socially by David Frost, he came away as impressed by her flirtatiousness as by her ferocity.

  A FRIEND LENT ME his flat in Mayfair for a month and I set about contacting fifty-plus members of the prime minister’s coterie, almost all of them male, her “star boys.” The stories they told me were startling and amusing. Once, when all her party officials were lined up for a photo op, she stopped the proceedings. Her eyes fell on a handsome young buck of an Irishman, John Ranelagh, a television producer chosen by the PM to be a member of her economic think tank. His double-breasted jacket was not buttoned up. Over lunch, Ranelagh told me he had felt her hand on his tie, slowly sliding to the top. Then her hand inside his jacket, feeling for the inside button. She purred, “John, if you wear a double-breasted jacket, you must always keep it buttoned.”

  “The sensation was one of hardening of the organs.” He chuckled in the retelling. “She is sexy and very interested in sex. You feel it when you work for her.” He speculated
that, given her strict background, “she’s never had enough sex, and now that her husband, Denis, is a little old and a little louche, she’s more demanding of other men. She seems to be always searching for a man who can stand up to her.”

  THE DAY BEFORE I WAS TO INTERVIEW Margaret Thatcher, a press officer took down my questions and warned that the prime minister was granting no interviews at all in connection with her tenth anniversary. However, Mrs. Thatcher had given her word that she would see me, and so, on the appointed day, I turned up at the famous door at No. 10 with a bunch of flowers. Precisely at eleven, Mrs. Thatcher burst in at a canter. The helmet hair, the pursed lips, the crisp white handkerchief in her breast pocket—all suggested a woman as tightly wound as a brussels sprout. Pains would have to be exerted to peel away some of her psychological reserve. Not one of the fifty-five sources I had spoken to claimed to be close to her.

  “You have gone to so much trouble,” she purred disarmingly, “it would be a terrible pity, you know, if I couldn’t find a little time.” Translation: I’ve heard how many people you’ve talked to and I want to find out what they’ve said about me.

  In person, the most remarkable features of this lady of sixty-three were the terrifying eyes that penetrated her guest. She asked if coffee was on the way. I had learned that she lived basically on coffee, vitamin C, and royal jelly—a wallop of minerals right from the hive, as befits a queen bee.

  I had been warned that she had no time for discussing how she ruled as a woman. Just the facts. But she totally surprised me. Since Mrs. Thatcher had agreed to talk about how her character was formed, she seemed determined to do it, as everything else, exceptionally well. She had read my questions and done her homework.

  “We’ll go straight in at the deep end,” she began.

  Growing up in Grantham where young Margaret Roberts lived over her father’s grocery store, she was never accepted by her peers. Before meeting the PM, I had visited Grantham. Her home was without hot water or an indoor toilet. Standing in her former bedroom told me much about the formation of her rigid political belief in individual enterprise. Out her back window was the worst slum in town, a breeding bed for the thieving class. But across the street, she could see her future. There stood a row of upmarket Edwardian houses with members of the smug professional class coming and going with dignity.

  Her origin in the social stratum considered most contemptible by the incurably class-conscious British—the lower middle class—ensured that Thatcher’s accomplishments were held against her. “That awful, jumped-up woman” was how the upper classes often referred to the grocer’s daughter who had vaulted class lines. A top Conservative Party official scoffed, “She is a very ordinary person.”

  Once this “ordinary person” made herself the most powerful woman in the world, people began referring to “Thatcherism” as if it were a coherent, worked-out ideology. What it really was, I began to infer, was a reflection of her character. The ultimate self-made woman, she was out to remake Britain from top to bottom in her own image.

  She attained that goal in her midlife passage. At the age of fifty-three, she became the first woman to lead a major Western democracy. After ten years of her rule, she was admired and abhorred on all six continents.

  In our interview, I observed, “Being a leader who is a woman seems to present no hardship to you.”

  She quoted Kipling. “‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male.’ So it’s nothing unusual—it’s just that people have got this strange thing that to be strong you have to be a man.”

  I began recounting the insults she had had to endure. She nodded impatiently. “What I can’t stand is when they say, ‘Oh well, she’s the only man in the Cabinet.’ I say, ‘She’s not. She’s the only woman.’”

  One source of her power, I observed, was that she didn’t care if she was liked. She only cared about being obeyed. When I asked if this was how she intimidated her opposition into submission, Thatcher bristled.

  “You see me in the House, I’m driven to be confrontational. I had to learn to be combative. To get it across. Of course, when you’re a woman and you’re combative, they say you’re an Iron Lady. Let me tell you”—and she snapped to like a bow after it’s flung its arrow—”if you hadn’t got a spine which was strong and firm, and a will which was strong and firm, we would never have got through. It is so much easier to”—contempt oozed over the next words—“be liked.”

  SOMETHING HAD CHANGED DRAMATICALLY since Mrs. Thatcher entered her sixties. She looked younger and prettier than the plump, gray, matronly Thatcher from the early ’80s. Back then she had a mushy jaw and crepey neck and a prominent gap between her teeth. It almost looked now like she was enjoying a second girlhood, or maybe her first. I uncovered her real secret.

  For rejuvenation of the aging body and skin, Thatcher had relied in recent years on a certain Indian woman whose identity was as closely guarded by her clients as their real ages. My source, a client, had to recommend me for an appointment. Madame Véronique, as the Indian woman called herself, practiced the ancient Hindu health system of Ayurveda. She had updated it with electrical underwater stimulation. The price of admission was a thousand dollars’ worth of her natural flower oils.

  I found the imperious madame in a village on the outskirts of London. Her establishment looked like a cross between a medical clinic and a massage parlor. But Madame Véronique carried herself with the air of an Indian queen, a rani. “I have the most high-powered women in the world,” she informed me. “Some run empires,” she said, a not-so-veiled boast regarding her most famous client. She also mentioned the Churchill family and Pamela Harriman.

  Madame Véronique directed me to disrobe and climb the steps to her formidable electrified tub. First, she explained, she would sprinkle garlic and salts in the water as it warmed. Then she would manipulate the .3 amps of current to “recharge the nervous system and release blocked energy.” Shivering at the top step, I was frankly terrified. I’d gone to great lengths to get a story, but I drew the line at electrocution.

  “My dear, I have had kings and princes and little bitty emirs in my tub,” she asserted in her high-pitched rani voice.

  I decided it was worth it to get the straight skinny on the prime minister from a woman who knew her inside and out. Sinking into the water, I allowed myself to be poached. As the current began needling my ankles, then calves, and tingled up the sides of my body, I found the sensation mildly pleasant. I imagined Thatcher allowing herself a rare hour of relaxation, although there was nothing sybaritic about the electrical tub. It was the equivalent of plugging in one’s phone charger overnight. Indeed, Madame Véronique warned me to go home and go to bed and not to drink or eat for the next twelve hours. I found the result of mild electrocution was a supercharge of energy and a slight halogen glow. It lasted for at least a month.

  I felt I could learn more from the rani. I had to call Tina and ask if Vanity Fair would stake me for a second session; she agreed. The next time, Madame Véronique became more loquacious. “Mrs. Thatcher is a very, very feminine woman,” she told me. “We are strong but not hard. Some men run from us.” But not strong men, she indicated. I kept prodding and was staggered when she revealed that one of her strong male clients was “Mr. Gorbachev,” leader of the Soviet Union. Definitely a referral by Thatcher.

  THATCHER HAD BEEN the very first Western leader to pluck a little-known provincial Communist Party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, out of the pack of those vying to replace the dying chairman of the Soviet Union. Back in 1984 she had invited Gorbachev to England and ordered a full-dress reception for him as if he were already general secretary. Their weekend at Checquers was so intimate, waiters had to remove their dinner plates, untouched, then stay late to refill their brandy glasses. “Maggie” had already given her heart to “Ronnie,” as she called the American president. But her Russian caller challenged the Great Communicator at his own game—leadership through personal chemistry.

  This was h
ow Gorbachev won her over, as Thatcher herself described to me in our interview: “President Reagan and I have always been close, but right from the beginning I found it easy to discuss and debate with President Gorbachev in a very animated way. Neither of us giving an inch.” The Russian leader questioned her on how Britain let go of its colonies and exchanged the empire for a commonwealth. He was looking for a formula to shed the Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe as a way of rescuing his desperate economy. When he insisted to his English hostess that Russians were really Europeans, Thatcher snapped back: they would never be accepted by Europe as long as his Eastern bloc was still barricaded behind the Iron Curtain. “It’s archaic,” she railed.

  A month after their marathon debate, Gorbachev began to spell out his vision for unyoking the outer Soviet empire. It was a watershed. Thatcher saw the first sign of change in Soviet expansionism. It was this startling shift that prompted her to put her seal of approval on the new leader.

  “I like Mr. Gorbachev,” she announced to a stunned capitalist world in 1984. “We can do business together.”

  The prime minister’s transformation into a seasoned coquette had coincided with her momentous trip to Moscow in 1987. That was when the relationship with Gorbachev became surprisingly intense. In preparing for her trip, she changed her look entirely. From tidy suits with tortured dressmaker details and floppy bows, Thatcher had the chief designer of Aquascutum lower her décolleté and hike up her skirts to show more of her fine legs.