The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin

by McGinniss, Joe

  Catherine didn’t like being bullied. She told Todd he had no right to cut across her property to get to his own. Todd told her, very plainly, that Sarah was mayor and they could do whatever they wanted, and it would be a mistake for her to try to stop them. Catherine called Sarah, who at least pretended to be more reasonable. Todd then called Catherine and said, “I don’t want you calling my wife again.”

  “He was angry,” Catherine tells me. She recalls that he also said, “If you do anything to make it more difficult for me to build my house, I’m going to be very unhappy.”

  She asked if he was threatening her. After a long pause, he said no, in a manner that did not convince her. It left her, in fact, with a “creepy, creepy, creepy feeling.” She went to her lawyer. Her lawyer said, “Todd’s right: Sarah is mayor. Do you really think you can fight city hall?”

  So the Palins cut through her land without her permission in order to build their new home. They moved in during the summer of 2002. Todd had the house built to within ten feet of the property line, as close as he could get legally, and put up a ten-foot-high fence, the back side facing Catherine’s house, which is not the way good-neighbor Alaskans usually do it.

  “They tortured that woman,” a friend of the Palins later told me. “I’d be with them when they were just laughing at her. I’d say, ‘Why are you being so mean?’ Sarah said, ‘Because we can.’ Todd said, ‘I want her to get the message: we’re here now.’ ”

  Because she was already settled in Settlers Bay, Catherine never intended to live in the Lake Lucille house. Her first thought had been to use it as a shelter for battered women, but once Mayor Palin and her family moved next door she realized the house couldn’t be as private as such a shelter needed to be.

  Instead, starting in 2005, she rented it to the Oxford House organization. Oxford House is a national network of group homes for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, with particular emphasis on those who’ve just been released from prison. Their motto is “Self-Help for Sobriety Without Relapse.” The residents themselves run the houses. There are more than six hundred Oxford Houses throughout the United States. Catherine’s was one of five in Alaska.

  The Palins never complained about their neighbors. Neither Todd nor Sarah seemed bothered by having six ex-cons and recovering addicts living in such close proximity to them and their children. “Sarah was very pleasant to the men,” Catherine tells me. “She’d say hi when she was down at the lake, and sometimes she’d send over a plate of cookies.”

  Catherine ran into problems in 2008, when the resident who’d been de facto manager of the house decided he was well enough to live on his own. Without his supervision, standards declined—to the point where two new arrivals began to build the meth lab in the basement, and Catherine had to call the state troopers to evict them.

  And, yes, before that there was a woman named Elann “Lenny” Moren, whose fiancé’s son tried to kill her with a machete. The man did succeed in killing his father with the machete, and less than twenty-four hours later he killed a complete stranger in Anchorage before he was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to 498 years in prison. His name was Christopher Erin Rogers, Jr.

  Because Lenny moved out before the Palins moved in, Todd and Sarah just missed having him for a neighbor.

  ONCE INSIDE the house, I’m pleasantly surprised. Down a flight of stairs from the front entrance is a finished basement in need of attention, but on the main level the dining area, living room, kitchen, and bathroom have been newly renovated, with brand-new appliances and fixtures.

  “Todd had this done last year,” Catherine tells me. “He and Sarah rented the house from May through October. He said he wanted to fix it up for a special guest who would be coming for an extended stay. Instead of paying rent, he renovated. I think Bristol and her baby were living here.

  “In October, when he was supposed to start paying three thousand dollars a month, he left me a message saying the guest wasn’t coming and they didn’t need the house anymore. I said, ‘Todd, you’re leaving me in the lurch. There’s no way I can rent this house through the winter.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’ll find someone.’ I said, ‘Yes, but I don’t want to rent to anyone you wouldn’t feel comfortable having next door.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. That’s why we built the fence.’

  “Colleen told me you were coming back,” Catherine says to me, “and I thought, ‘How perfect!’ I tried to reach you for months.”

  “And now you have.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s more than perfect. But I can’t pay three thousand a month.”

  “What can you pay?”

  “Fifteen hundred? And only for the next few months. Once I’ve finished talking to people, I’ve got to go home and write.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  No need for any formalities, such as a lease. I write her a check and we seal the deal in the old-fashioned Alaskan way: with a hug.

  “You’ve never been in prison, have you?” Catherine asks me as we walk back to our cars.

  “Nope.”

  “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”

  “Not yet.”

  “In that case, you’ll be the first neighbor Todd and Sarah have ever had here who didn’t have a criminal record.”

  MARNIE LOANS ME a duvet, and Tom puts some fresh-caught salmon and halibut into a cooler. I buy a Traeger grill. Traeger is an Oregon company that makes grills that use wood pellets instead of charcoal or gas. I’ve always been a charcoal man. I’d as soon cook indoors in an electric oven as use a gas grill outside. On the other hand, I don’t want to burn down Catherine’s house by cooking with charcoal on a wooden deck. The Traeger seems to offer a path between the horns of my dilemma.

  I buy the Traeger Junior, the smallest model, taking the one already assembled because I’d never have the patience or skill to put a grill together myself and I don’t want to have to ask my new neighbors to help me. It’s not polite to ask for a favor on the day you move in.

  I head up the Parks Highway and get to the house in time to set up the grill and cook some of Tom’s salmon, which I eat on my deck overlooking the lake. It’s the best salmon I’ve ever eaten.

  Except for a dining room table, four chairs, two plastic deck chairs, one horribly saggy mattress on a broken box spring, some old dishes, and a mix of plastic and metal utensils, Catherine’s house is unfurnished. If Bristol and her baby were living here, they were living rough.

  But furnishings are a problem for tomorrow. Right now I’m still trying to come to terms with my amazing stroke of good fortune.

  Admittedly, Lake Lucille is dead: not fit for either fishing or swimming. Even before Sarah became mayor in 1996, the lake was listed as “impaired” by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. The runaway growth Sarah encouraged during her six years in office worsened the problem. Leaching septic systems and fertilizer runoff, combined with pollution caused by the heavy automotive traffic through Wasilla, have killed off the fish population. “It’s basically just a runway for floatplanes,” one resident says.

  Even so, it sure is nice to look at on a fine spring evening. I play music on my laptop and enjoy a glass of wine on my deck, listening to the grebes squawk and the Alaska Railroad trains whistle in the dimming light of midnight as they race along the tracks that run parallel to the highway, less than fifty yards behind my house.

  As a red-and-white floatplane lands on the lake and taxis toward the Best Western dock, I can’t help but feel that I’ve never been off to a better start researching a book.

  Did Catherine rent me this house because, as she says, she wanted a tenant who she knew would respect the Palins’ privacy? Or was she motivated, at least in part, by lingering raw feelings over the way Todd steamrollered her when he wanted to build? I don’t know. I’m just glad to be here. I move to a state two and a half times bigger than Texas and I wind up living fifteen feet from the subject of my next book. Forty years
in the business and I’ve never had a piece of luck like this.

  It’s not that my proximity to Sarah will enable me to learn anything about her that I wouldn’t discover if I were living in Anchorage, as I’d planned to: I’m not going to spy on her, or crouch in the backyard with my ear pressed up against the fence. But being here will certainly give my book a sense of place.

  At first, Sarah probably will be less than thrilled to learn I’m here. I wrote a cover story for Condé Nast Portfolio magazine in 2009 that was highly critical of her proposal for a natural gas pipeline, and she expressed irritation about it at the time. I also wrote a piece for The Daily Beast that pointed out that while she was claiming to tour the country by bus to promote her book Going Rogue, she was actually doing most of the tour by private plane. Now I’m here to work on a book about her.

  So, no, she won’t be happy to learn that I’ll be living next door for the coming few months. And who can blame her? Nonetheless, once she understands that I’m not here to hassle her, or to invade her family’s privacy in any way, maybe we can become, if not friends, then at least reasonably cordial summer neighbors. She got along fine with the Oxford House guys, so why not with me? All things great and small seem possible on a magnificent night such as this.

  TWO

  SARAH WAS BORN February 11, 1964, in Sandpoint, Idaho, then a town of fewer than five thousand people, almost all of them Caucasian, about fifty miles from the Canadian border.

  Her father, Chuck Heath, grew up there. In Going Rogue, Sarah describes his childhood as “painful and lonely.” Chuck’s father, Orville Wayne “Charlie” Heath, earned a living taking photographs of boxers and wrestlers in Los Angeles. In 1948, when Chuck was ten, his father abandoned photography, uprooted the family to Idaho, and opened a fishing lure shop, while his wife, a Christian Scientist, taught school.

  Sarah writes, “Dad doesn’t talk much about his childhood.” This is peculiar, because in Wasilla, Chuck Heath is known as a raconteur. Why no stories of growing up in northern Idaho in the 1950s? Sarah doesn’t say, but Going Rogue contains this striking passage: “Through the years I heard enough muffled conversations between my mom and dad to know that his parents’ acceptance of pain must have translated beyond the physical.”

  What can a reader make of that? Or of this: “Sports and the outdoors were Dad’s passion, but his parents thought they were a waste of time.”

  Chuck’s father, a sports photographer who left L.A. to sell fishing lures in an area of the United States where hunting and fishing were almost sacred parts of communal life, thought sports and the outdoors were a waste of time?

  Whatever the case, as a teenager, unable to tolerate what Sarah calls “his family’s brokenness,” Chuck moved out. “He went from couch to couch,” Sarah writes, “staying with different families … and was virtually adopted by a classmate’s kind family, the Mooneys.”

  The adoption may have been more than virtual. A 1992 obituary of eighty-year-old Dorothy Mooney, of Sandpoint, lists among her survivors “an adopted son, Chuck Heath of Wasilla, Alaska.”

  Sarah’s mother, Sally Sheeran, grew up—less traumatically, it appears—in Richland, Washington. Sally’s father worked at the nearby Hanford nuclear plant.

  Chuck and Sally met at Columbia Basin, a junior college in Pasco, Washington. They married in 1961.

  Chuck began to teach school in Sandpoint. Chuck Junior was followed by Heather the next year, and by Sarah a year later. Molly arrived two years after Sarah.

  SARAH WAS three months old when the family moved to Skagway, a historic gold-mining town in southeastern Alaska. After five years they moved to south-central Alaska, living in Eagle River, just north of Anchorage, for two years before settling in Wasilla in 1972, when the town’s population was less than five hundred.

  Chuck taught at Iditarod Elementary School. Sally found part-time clerical work. She also left the Roman Catholic Church and joined the Assembly of God, soon becoming a committed evangelical.

  Paul Riley, the founding pastor of the Wasilla Assembly of God church, remembers Sarah first attending services when she was in second grade. In addition, she became active in a church program for girls called Missionettes. By the time she was twelve, Riley says, “She began to have a strong desire for the Lord.”

  The major event of Sarah’s childhood occurred that summer, the summer of 1976. Immersing themselves—or being immersed—in the waters of a nearby lake, she and her mother were baptized together by Pastor Riley. “Sarah loved the Lord with all her heart,” Riley says, adding, “I know that she did receive an experience of the Holy Spirit, and that she received a calling on her life.”

  The baptism also affected Sarah’s mother. She seemed to lose interest in both husband and children. “These days,” an old friend says, “we’d call it a dysfunctional family. Primarily because Sally never really functioned as a mother. Once she got caught up in Assembly of God, all her energy went into the church and none of it into raising her children.

  “Sarah’s older sister, Heather, was the mom. She cooked, cleaned, took care of everything in the house. Sally was always off doing something with the church. You’d go there any time of the day when school was not in session and Heather was baking or cleaning, making sure that everything was ready for everybody.

  “The kids were not tended to as children. The house was run-down. Where the kids slept upstairs, they had a room with a woodstove in it, and the girls had an attic where they slept, and there was no heat, so if they didn’t leave the door open it was cold.” Another childhood friend of Sarah’s says, “I spent the night over there a couple of times and I remember Sarah and Molly and I all sleeping in the same bed because it was that cold.”

  A longtime Wasilla acquaintance recalls that “Chuck Heath was a good teacher and a terrific track coach, but he had a mean streak, and very high expectations for the kids. They were forced to do sports. Sarah liked playing basketball, but she only did cross country and track because her dad made her. She did it to appease him. She didn’t want that meanness turned on her.

  “Chuck was definitely not a nice dad with Chuck Junior. I remember one summer he actually threw him out of the house for not cutting firewood when he was supposed to. And whenever anybody got involved in any sport, they had to win. There was no such thing as losing. Being competitive is one thing, but Chuck carried it way beyond that.

  “Bottom line, there was not a lot of tenderness or loving in that household, mostly because Sally never really was a mom. She just wasn’t a nurturing person. Sarah’s not either, of course, but maybe that’s because she never received any nurturing as a child.”

  As Sarah entered adolescence, her religion seemed to define her. She liked boys and hard rock and heavy metal—Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd being particular favorites—but she loved the God she learned about from Pastor Riley.

  Not that this was unusual in Wasilla. “In high school, if you wanted to play on a varsity team, you had to join the Fellowship of Christian Athletes,” J. C. McCavit, a classmate of Sarah’s, says. Sarah became a leader of the Fellowship. A former basketball teammate recalls, “Her group was always making us pray before games. I hated that. They’d start talking over each other, saying, ‘Lord Jesus protect us’ and ‘Praise Jesus,’ and on and on. Why should I be forced to do that if I didn’t believe that way? But if I didn’t, I’d be blackballed.”

  When the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams took long bus trips to away games, the girls would sit in the front, leaving the back to the boys. But Sarah didn’t sit still. “She’d come back there with these Assembly of God pamphlets,” McCavit says, “and start preaching to us all about ‘the Rapture.’ We’d be like, ‘Yo, Sarah, go back and sit down. We’re playing cards.’ I remember even way back then she kept talking about how the Bible said the Middle East was going to be a bloodbath and that the end-times were upon us or drawing nigh or some such shit. Nobody paid her any attention, not even Todd.”

  One idi
osyncrasy recalled by another schoolmate was Sarah’s propensity for sleeping naked on athletic trips. “We’d all sleep on the floor of a classroom, on little mats about an inch thick,” the schoolmate recalls. “The boys would be in one classroom and the girls would be across the hall. The girls were amazed: there would be these pictures of Abraham Lincoln looking down, and Sarah would be walking around naked. It was a little bit weird. They said they’d all be getting ready for bed, wearing T-shirts and pajama bottoms, and Sarah would be naked. She said it wasn’t healthy for girls to sleep with clothes on because you needed to, more or less, air it out after having had clothes on all day. I don’t know where she got that from. Maybe it was something her father taught her.”

  Sleeping nude in a room full of girls did not indicate promiscuity. In Sarah’s case, quite the contrary. “I know a few who took a swing at the plate and came up empty,” a classmate recalls. “She didn’t have any boyfriends until Todd. John Cottle used to call Sarah and her little gang The Nunnery.”

  Not many Wasilla High boys considered Sarah attractive. “She wasn’t remarkable at all,” one says. “Round features, big, heavy-rimmed glasses, a goofy haircut, and that goofy voice. All the guys were after her sisters. Heather was a nice-looking blond girl, and Molly was also a blonde, cute as a button. Sarah was the homely brunette in the middle. She could never quite compete with either of her sisters for attractiveness.”

  One who did find her attractive was Todd Palin, who arrived in Wasilla at the start of senior year and immediately created a stir. He was good-looking and he drove a classic Ford Mustang Mach 1, blue with a white stripe. He also owned a Datsun four-wheel-drive truck with a lift kit, which he quickly upgraded to a Toyota pickup with oversize tires and chrome alloy rims with gold centers.