Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (19 page)

“But we have to live there,” he said. “It’s close to the statehouse, and it can accommodate meetings and large gatherings.”

“If we’re going to live there, we have to renovate.”

“Well, what about the Foundation? Let’s see how much money is available for renovations.”

We put the question on hold.

THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS,
Jim was going to Vancouver to see his daughter. Though I’d now been with Jim for five years, I still had not met Morag; but from the photographs I’d seen, she was a very pretty and demure little girl, often dressed in floral prints, with ribbons in her hair. While she didn’t seem to shrink from being photographed, she never looked directly into the camera either. I wondered what she was like. I could see she looked very much like Jim. So did Jacqueline, from the very moment she was born. In fact, the two girls looked more like full sisters than my brother Paul’s two daughters did.

Jim went to visit Morag at Christmastime every year, but I’d hoped that he’d have her come stay with us as I had suggested several times, or that he would go a bit later this year, perhaps after his inauguration. However, as he had all the other times, he said that her mother would not allow her to come spend time with us.

JIM’S RELATIONSHIP WITH
Kari continued to make me uneasy. I suspected that he was still involved with her, maybe even in love with her. My misgivings dated back to Election Night of 1997, the night Jim had not returned my phone call, though the papers reported on his late-night conversation with Kari. Before Jim and I married, I often saw mail from Morag lying around his house. Usually the envelopes were written in an adult hand—Kari’s, I assumed—but the contents, at least the contents I saw, were often drawings by Morag, or little cards or notes. But soon after Jim and I were married and I began living with him in Woodbridge, the envelopes mysteriously stopped. Later I learned that all of Kari’s mail was being addressed to Jim’s office—I assumed at his direction. I also noticed that whenever Kari called, Jim took the call as far away from me as he could. What was that about?

Jim went to Vancouver as planned, returning on New Year’s Eve, which we spent at home with close friends, including Lori and Jimmy Kennedy, dining on take-out chicken from Boston Market. By now, Jimmy’s 1997 Election Night worries—about what would happen to his friendship with Jim if Jim became governor—had resolved themselves. In hindsight, I wish I could have felt as resolved as he did. In any case, I was content to be spending one uninterrupted evening with my husband and new daughter. It wasn’t intimate, but it was peaceful.

Meanwhile, ready or not, preparations for the inauguration were taking place, and I needed an outfit for the swearing-in and a gown for the inaugural ball. I liked St. John suits but had never owned one. Now that I was going to be the First Lady—one of fewer than fifty, since not all American governors are men—I decided that because I’d worked so hard to get to this day I deserved to treat myself. So I went to the local mall and purchased a red St. John suit. There was press grousing about the cost, but what business was it of theirs? It wasn’t the taxpayers’ money. Deciding on the inaugural gown would be a little more complicated. Although I’d be slimmer than I initially anticipated being, I worried about how I’d look.

Maria, the wife of one of Jim’s supporters, worked for Vera Wang, my favorite designer, and Maria had called Jim’s office to ask that I call her. The message had the annotation “inaugural gown,” but I didn’t know what that meant, though I did remember telling her that my wedding gown had been a Vera Wang.

When I learned that Vera Wang herself wanted to design my gown I was thrilled. I hadn’t been thinking about an inaugural gown at all, just about how much pain I was in and how much sleep I needed. Before the chaos of the last month and a half, “inaugural gown” had been somewhere on my list, but since then I hadn’t given it a thought. I knew that the gowns worn by presidential First Ladies were fodder for the fashion pages, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the same interest might apply to gubernatorial First Ladies. Still, I was thrilled that Vera Wang wanted to design a dress for me and delighted that she was offering to send two of her employees for a personal consultation to find out my preferences in style, material, and color. I instantly—and gratefully—agreed. Who wouldn’t want Vera Wang to design a gown for her?

It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I felt like a celebrity, a few days before Christmas, when Maria came to the house to take my measurements. I felt I was about the size of Little Toot and wasn’t exactly eager to reveal my dimensions, but she whipped out her tape measure and waved away my objections.

“Two weeks after you’ve had a baby, and you’re a size eight? I don’t want to hear any complaints!” she said, all business. “What color?”

“Black.”

“We’re going to make you a spectacular gown. Vera already has something in mind.” And then she was gone.

A few days before the inaugural, Maria swept into our house again, this time with a magnificent strapless black gown, all silk and organza with beading below the waist. It was just like my wedding gown, only in black. As with the St. John suit, before the end of Inauguration Day the gown had become fodder for the reporters. When had I gotten these outfits? What had I paid for them? Was this an indication of things to come?

One of my first jobs was to figure out what a First Lady was supposed to look like, or at least how
I
was supposed to look now that I had become the First Lady of New Jersey. I thought about my hairstyle, my makeup, and how I carried myself. But more than anything else, I thought about how to dress. For longer than I care to admit, I felt as though I were playing dress-up, masquerading in someone else’s costume, and I really needed every “ma’am” and ball gown and shred of protocol I could get my hands on to feel that I really was First Lady. I worked hard at it, but I knew I was making the rules up as I went along.

Hillary Clinton has said she thought of Eleanor Roosevelt—and, in her mind, talked to her—when she became First Lady of the nation. Before the inauguration, I’d been thinking about role models too, and I thought I’d found two: Hillary herself and Jackie Kennedy. I identified with Hillary as a Baby Boomer First Lady, the first to have her own profession and her own name, and to want to maintain her own distinct identity. In an altogether different way, I also identified with Jackie Kennedy. She was a First Lady in her thirties, an elegantly dressed woman with a brand-new baby and a mansion to renovate.

Being First Lady would become a big and gratifying job, but it would be different from my daily job. When you’re First Lady, there’s no such thing as a dress-down Friday. Far more often, it’s about dressing
up,
and far more expensive! It turned out Jim would have a $70,000 budget for expenses, but when it came to clothing, all he needed was one pair of patent leather shoes and one tux (which he already had from our wedding), seven or eight suits, and several dozen shirts and rep ties. But there was no budget for the First Lady’s wardrobe, and yet as First Lady I would spend quadruple what I had as a private figure who just liked dressing well. The Vera Wang gown I wore to the inaugural ball was only my second designer outfit. (The first was my wedding gown, not exactly a versatile garment.)

As I learned about functions I would have to attend as First Lady—fund-raisers, dinners, ceremonies—I realized I would need several suits, ball gowns, and cocktail dresses, not to mention shoes and accessories to match. More than that, I realized I had to establish my own style as a young First Lady who was also a working mother.

Clothes aren’t just clothes, after all. If they make the man, they also make the woman—or help to. Jim was well aware of that, and as his term progressed—and perhaps as he began to need the cover of his “perfect family”—he would more and more often expect me to wear St. John suits and other designer items on a daily basis. Just weeks before what was to be his resignation speech, he even urged me to go ahead and spend $500 for a pair of designer shoes. It was an extravagance I couldn’t justify, so I refused. Still, it was hard to keep up with it all.

OVERALL, IT WAS A
dizzying time. There I was, a nursing mother of an infant barely a month old, wearing my Vera Wang strapless gown out to an inaugural ball. Would I leak milk and ruin my gown? And if so, would it show up in the photographs? Or, worse, on television? Who was there for me to consult on such matters? Jacqueline and I were now as attached as two strips of Velcro, and leaving her was wrenching, yet there was no way I could bring her along to any of the inaugural events. For the first time—and the hundreds more times that would follow—I was having to juggle motherhood and First Ladyhood. (And soon having a job would be thrown into the mix.) I found an experienced baby-sitter for inauguration night whom I knew and trusted—the mother of two children, one of whom required special care—but, nevertheless, a baby-sitter. I would have felt better if I were leaving Jacqueline with my parents, but they were going to be at the inaugural ball as well. So I worried, but now that I’d fallen down the gubernatorial rabbit hole, I had state troopers at my disposal every minute of the day, and if I needed them to, they could turn on their sirens and lights and whisk me home in minutes.

I was up at 4:30
A.M.
on Tuesday, January 15, Inauguration Day, and took my shower before waking Jim at 5:00 so he could take his—there were two bathrooms, but I’d never gotten around to fixing the second shower, and I certainly wasn’t going to put it on my list of household repairs now. The events of the day started quite early, with a prayer service at Princeton’s University Chapel. Jim, in his customary uniform—blue suit, white shirt, and red-striped tie—was ebullient. From there, it was on to the War Memorial in Trenton for the swearing-in ceremony. There was gridlock galore, but with our trooper escorts we glided through. My parents and my brother Paul and his wife, Elvie, who’d had Jacqueline with them, barely made it. In the flurry of events, no one, including me, had made sure that they too had trooper escorts. Paul was irritated. “We should have had an escort,” he said. “We had your daughter with us.”

Jim and I were joined onstage at the War Memorial by three former governors; the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, who would swear Jim in; his parents; and fellow legislators. In the audience were Jacqueline, my family—including my brother Rick, Jim’s sisters, brother-in-law, niece and nephew, and other relatives—and several hundred friends, supporters, and staff. After the benediction, given by the pastor of our parish church in Woodbridge, and after a few more assorted speeches, finally the moment we’d worked so hard for was at hand—the swearing-in of Jim as New Jersey’s fifty-first governor. Just before he stood in front of Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz, as we had planned, my mother climbed the steps to the stage to hand Jacqueline to me so that she could be onstage with us when Jim took the oath. I couldn’t help but think, with a bit of a twinge, that this public moment was also our most moving family moment since Jacqueline’s birth. At the same time, it was a moment of pride and magic, the next step of a journey that had begun with a wedding photograph, the White House in plain sight.

I’d never seen so many camera flashes as I did at that moment when Jacqueline was settling into my arms. There was a collective “Awww!”—that unmistakable noise made by adults in the presence of babies or kittens—when I took her from my mother’s arms. Since my parents had been seated in the front row, few had seen that my mother had been holding a baby or that that baby was Jacqueline. This was the public’s second glimpse of a little girl who to this day almost instinctively poses for the camera at a moment’s notice, invariably giving herself a central place in the mix.

At Jim’s inauguration, however, she was not yet capable even of holding up her own head, much less arranging the participants, so Jim’s mother held the Bible and I stood to his right holding Jacqueline. His father, Jack, had tears in his eyes as he watched his son take the oath of office. Once Jim completed the oath, I handed Jacqueline back over to my mother and we sat down to listen to the rest of the speeches.

Next was the inaugural parade. On this clear and cold morning, we walked several blocks through downtown Trenton and then stood on the grandstand to view the rest of the parade, Jim in his new navy blue overcoat. After that, we went home to get ready for the inaugural ball, and Jacqueline and I were reunited for a few hours before I had to put on my Vera Wang gown and leave again.

The evening was a festive blur. We had seats but never sat in them. Instead we shook hands, dispensed hugs, posed for photographs. I’ve since been asked if Golan Cipel was there, and the answer is yes, he was. All Jim’s staff and supporters were there, and though I saw Golan, it was only in passing.

It was an exciting day. Jim pulled me on through a crowd so thick that James Schedrick, the tallest and most muscular trooper on duty that day, was assigned the role of Protector of the Gown. My gown. In that capacity, he served as a human barricade, walking behind me everywhere I went, with his arms outstretched in order to keep the guests off the train. He was accompanied by at least half a dozen other troopers who, in that very packed ballroom, created a protective circle around Jim and me.

The ball continued at the Raritan Center in Edison until well into the night, with all of us exuding a sense of triumph and exuberance and high spirits. Jim and I danced the merengue and the samba together, and then later a slow dance or two. I was very proud of him that night and very excited about what I thought he was going to be able to do for the state of New Jersey. The papers the next morning described the ball as having an aura of Camelot, with all its youth, glamour, promise, and potential. At the end, back home, we collapsed into bed, and the next morning the newest chapter in our lives began.