After Mark was sworn in, we hosted a luncheon for all the constitutional officeholders at the Lace House, adjacent to the mansion. Then we held the traditional governor’s open house. We stood in the Hall of Governors, greeting people who had waited in the cold for hours to meet Mark and me, warmed by hot cider and cookies provided by the mansion staff. I remember Bolton, then age six, running in from the other side of the hall screaming with glee, “Dad, this place is incwedible and you ought to see the kitchen!? They have bwownies, Little Debbie cakes, evewything, and its all FWEE!”
Together he and his brothers already had covered every inch of this grand house, while Mark and I had yet to get above the main floor. As we stood shaking hundreds of hands, the boys were running all over the mansion, finding secret staircases and alternate routes between the floors that allowed them to avoid the formal rooms and the waiting public. When they tired of that, they snuck their friends past security to join them on the lawn.
There were moments when I just wanted to dash off and find out what they were up to, but I couldn’t budge. I was so delighted when I heard a familiar voice yell out, “Oh my goodness! What is the fastest-talking girl in the Midwest doing married to the governor of South Carolina and living in a house like this?” It was Julie Joyce Kenary from Winnetka, the friend with whom I lurched around Wisconsin back roads on a summer afternoon trying to master the stick shift. She’d traveled all the way from Boston to surprise me! Comforted to have someone there who “knew me when,” I too felt I needed to pinch myself to make sure this was really happening.
After that and the inaugural barbecue, I could hardly stand any longer. We’d smiled until our cheeks hurt. When Mark and I finally went upstairs to get ready for bed, we were exhausted, yet filled with pride and great hope in our grand new home. I was pleased I had worked with the staff to give the mansion some personal touches for our first night there. I’d sent ahead family photos and favorite paintings of the low-country, which they hung around the family quarters and the public rooms. We’d also sent a bunk bed to add to the beds already in the mansion. Marshall wanted his own room, and there were plenty of bedrooms in the mansion, but Mark believed in carrying on as he and his brothers had, and I agreed that sharing a room was yet another way they might learn adaptability.
We tucked them into their beds and made our way, weary but joyful, into our new bedroom. Our family was beginning another exciting journey through unknown territory. I myself stumbled looking for light switches during the night. The learning curve would be steep.
As First Lady Iris Campbell told me, living in the mansion was “like living above the shop” and she was so right. Our rooms were at the top of the long staircase in the entrance hall and they were not fully closed off. We could hear the events and tours below, and they likely could hear us too. When guests often exclaimed, “This house is beautiful! Don’t you just love living here?” I would smile and politely respond, “It is a beautiful home and there is so much that comes with this house!” Yes, and even more than I expected on that first day as First Lady.
In the first week, I discovered that the boys required a new set of rules. I found myself yelling, “Boys, don’t throw those balls! You might break the chandelier!”
Marshall’s pragmatic response: “Whoever heard of a chandelier in a playroom?”
Balls, swords, and toy guns had to remain outside or in the pool house. Running in the house or sliding down the banister was discouraged, rather ineffectively. At first, I said no scooters in the house. I relented when the boys showed me how well the wheels glided on the marble floors and in the kitchen without leaving any scuff marks. We had great wheelbarrow races in the marble hallway and even whirled each other around in the wheelchair we kept for elderly or disabled guests. Thankfully no one went through the glass doors.
The boys also played manhunt or hide and seek with the aid of the mansion’s security cameras. I’d hear one of them at the bank of security monitors yelling to another outside, “He’s under the big oak tree!” Once, the boys were playing hide and seek with friends inside the mansion, and security called me in to look at one boy who was hiding in the industrial dryer in the basement. The guard was worried for his safety. I chuckled at this clever hiding spot. I was only worried about the dryer.
I realized quickly that each time the boys had friends over, I needed to line up the newcomers outside the front door and explain the rules before entering, including, you break it, you pay for it. Our only mishap was a science experiment with fire and wax conducted in the dining room. Needless to say, the boys soon found out how much it cost to refinish a table.
When we had been in the governor’s mansion just a few months, Blake decided to take the elevator to go upstairs for bed. The elevator got stuck, and he was trapped inside for forty-five minutes, a long time for a small child. The security team called me down to watch Blake on the elevator camera recording his every move. First we turned the power on and off, trying to reboot the system. That didn’t work. Next we called the elevator company, but the representative who had the right key was three hours away. I went to the elevator door to keep Blake comforted while the staff tried to solve this problem. Finally we had to take the option everyone wanted to avoid: a 911 call to the fire department, which also had a key.
As soon as the firefighters left, a reporter called asking why fire trucks had been at the governor’s mansion. On the front page of the paper the next day was a photo of Blake under the headline “4-Year-Old Survives Elevator Scare.” Ever adapting, we used the experience as a lesson to the boys that actions have consequences. They should think, we explained, before getting ideas about pouring suds into the mansion’s fountain or pulling a false fire alarm, anything that might alert emergency authorities and thus the press. Learning to be on guard for the press has thus far helped keep the boys from embarrassment, but all the same, I regret the loss of innocence and boyishness that accompanies the grown-up-too-soon requirement to be ever conscious of one’s public image.
In these unique surroundings and with this schedule, I constantly struggled to give the boys normal responsibilities, such as regular chores. I didn’t want them getting used to living a life of luxury. I asked that they make their beds daily, feed the dogs, and clear the table. But even that last simple request had to be modified for mansion living. I would have liked them to clear the dishes to the industrial kitchen and rinse and stack them at the sink. One sink, however, featured a hose with a nozzle that hung from the ceiling, a tempting weapon if there ever was one. After several epic water fights, I asked them only to clear the plates and dishes from the table, no rinsing required.
In addition to managing the boys, managing the mansion took more time than I had expected. The mansion was broke. Most of the funds appropriated for that fiscal year were gone, and we still had six months to go. I had to somehow find the money to continue the events that “the First Lady always hosts” and more. I worked to make sure that we didn’t have to close the mansion, as Mark had suggested to the press. I’m a believer in leaving things better than you found them, and I certainly didn’t want to allow this grand old complex to deteriorate on my watch. I raised money privately to help finish out the year and set out immediately to cut costs and reorganize the staff.
First, I eliminated the high-paid position of mansion director, and I took over those duties myself for free, learning on the go. Then the new chef discovered that the outgoing administration had burned most of the kitchen files, including financial records, event details, recipes, grocery information, and items to guide us on how to keep the mansion running. Suddenly I was managing a large staff with well-defined, though limited, duties without a guidebook. Some people just washed dishes while others only helped in the kitchen. After the first week, a staff member told me about a new crisis. We needed to hire an additional person to help the woman whose sole duty was keeping up with the cleaning, as she needed help with the ironing.
“The ironing?” I asked, amaz
ed. “Please tell me what, exactly, requires so much ironing?”
She had been taught that the First Family must always look pressed and perfect, and thus she routinely ironed every shirt, all shorts and pants, even underwear. The sheets were washed and ironed every week. Now that there was laundry for six people in the First Family, the ironing responsibilities would surely be too much for just one person who also was charged with doing the cleaning.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I laughed. She obviously had no clue about Mark Sanford, a guy who prided himself on saving money on dry cleaning by making a starched white shirt last ten days. The notion of taxpayers funding someone to iron his underwear was absurd!
I chuckled as I led the woman to the dryer and showed her how we Sanfords “iron” polo shirts, shorts, pants, and underwear: we removed them from a dryer while hot and shook out the wrinkles before folding and placing the clothes in a drawer. Changing the linen every two weeks was sufficient for me, and my kids wouldn’t notice, I assured her, if they were ironed. I told her not to bother. Crisis solved.
After that, I instituted a team approach with adaptability as the new mode for everyone. I asked the staff to have an open mind and to think on their feet. Someone doing laundry might be expected to serve when the governor entertained guests and someone helping the chef would also be expected to load the dishwasher when needed, and so on. It was not long before the chef and I figured out who worked well in this type of setup and scaled down the staff accordingly. This reorganization saved the taxpayers more than $1.5 million over the years and has allowed us to operate without further private funds.
In addition to reorganizing operations at the mansion itself, I knew we had to attack the long-term problem of maintenance on the historic property. There was a nonprofit Governor’s Mansion Foundation, and I decided to raise money to modestly renovate the empty Lace House so it could be rented for events and generate income for the complex. Mark’s mother is a concert pianist who had studied at Juilliard, and she performed beautifully there to help us raise funds. When the renovation was complete, the Lace House soon became one of the top places in Columbia to host a wedding. The house ultimately netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits, which is in turn used for upkeep on the property.
The boys and I also wrote a children’s history book called Mischief in the Mansion to raise money for the Foundation. I’d been giving the boys a daily business lesson on the way to school. Driven there in a state vehicle, I’d read them highlights from the Wall Street Journal and quiz them on how the news affected stocks. “The price of oil is way up today boys. What does that mean?” Mark had opened each of them an account with five hundred dollars so they could trade. They began watching the market carefully. As a result, they didn’t like the fact that they didn’t profit from the sale of the books, but we learned about producing a book and marketing it all the same. By combining the small profit from the book, fees from the rentals, and Foundation funds, we then renovated the historic gardens. This further increased rentals there and improved access and use by the public.
Living a life with so many formal ceremonies offered us other great parenting opportunities. We could teach the kids how to be polite young men who knew how to conduct themselves with our company. If we had formal dinners or receptions, we would encourage the boys to join us in welcoming visitors. We chose carefully which dinners we wanted them to attend, only requiring them to be there when we hoped they might learn something from the guest. When the dinner was just for adults, we asked them to come downstairs to shake hands around the formal dining table and then return to do their homework upstairs. If the English cut-crystal chandelier shook, we knew a game of tag was taking precedence over their studies. This was wonderful boy noise to me. I didn’t want to sanitize their home experience too much. Yes, they were greeting formal guests who sat around a table under a majestic chandelier, but sometimes they were barefoot and sometimes in mismatched pajamas. However they were dressed, they made me smile and helped keep my perspective grounded.
The boys weren’t the only ones learning about protocol and etiquette. We entertained Madame Wu Yi, a vice premier and at the time the highest-ranking woman in China. The staff and I studied the rules of Chinese decorum and how they acknowledge a respected visitor, rules that were very different than the way honored guests are entertained in the west. The guest of honor had to sit facing a certain direction, we used red and yellow flowers arranged in numbers favorable to the Chinese, and we avoided anything white so as not to offend. Guests had to be arranged for a predinner meeting specifically according to rank, and we had to figure out the pecking order exactly. Mark was away on military duty for that event, and thus I adapted and was intent on making a good showing all on my own. I was proud that we made no mistakes.
With Mark as governor, things for us as a family changed in some ways for the better and in some not quite so. Living again under the same roof, Mark was often there to put the boys to bed and out of that grew his cherished routine of telling them a Bible story or lesson for the day. Yet we were still at the mercy of the almighty schedule. Mark was back into the life of five-minute meetings and thirty-second sound bites. For his schedulers, the public came first. This was a constant battle, and it was easy to get worn down. There were many nights when he was out giving speeches, being the featured speaker at fundraisers, or traveling the country and the globe for state business. Even nights at home were often booked for receptions and other official events. Still we had more family time than we had had when he was in Congress. On the nights when Mark was home, he attended many of the boys’ sports events, and he truly delighted in riding bikes with them or playing sports on the lawn. We grew to savor the occasional evening we had when it was just the boys and us.
There were extraordinary occasions for the boys too. Once we had an event at the mansion where there were NASCAR cars in the driveway and Tony Stewart landed on the lawn in a helicopter. (Blake conveniently had a cold and had skipped school that day.) They loved it when Steve Spurrier, coach of the Carolina Gamecocks, would come by or Dave Odom, the basketball coach. The boys became avid fans of the USC teams and so I tried to get used to the notion that four sons wearing hats that said “COCKS” was something of which a mother should be proud.
When we returned from a ten-day trip in August 2003, we discovered the mansion had developed a different kind of life of its own: black mold that was growing up the walls in the hall outside our bedroom and on every item of clothing and every pair of shoes in our closet. This was despite the fact that the air conditioner had been running the entire time we were gone. The arm of the bureaucracy that governed expenses at the house—the Budget and Control Board (BCB)—said that all we had was a tiny humidity problem and that everything in the house was fine. If it was my house, I said, and I had just spent all that money renovating it, I would get everyone who had had anything to do with the air system in to figure out why this happened.
Alas, it was not my house and clearly, governor or not, we were not in charge. The BCB worked to reduce the humidity but ignored the possible cause of the mold—government housing and bureaucracy at its best. Mark wouldn’t let me pay someone to look into the problem, so I asked an engineer to volunteer his time. He concluded that there was, indeed, a problem in the house. No surprise to me. Still the BCB stonewalled me until I literally had to threaten in June 2004 to sue a bureaucrat over our own health and safety. The threat worked and soon efforts began to fix the problem. We decided the safest course was for us to all move into the one-room pool house. Getting permission to sleep in the pool house took some doing too as we needed approval from a number of state and federal agencies to do so, but it was surely safer than breathing the toxic mold.
Despite the six of us being crammed into that one room for weeks on end, I have a fondness for that pool house. One of my cherished memories of our time at the mansion took place there, and it has nothing to do with mold and is unrelated to swimming in the
pool.
Near the end of Mark’s first term, Bobby McNair, the son of former governor Robert McNair, asked if he could have a reunion of sorts in the mansion with other sons—most now grown men—of South Carolina governors.
Bobby arrived with five other sons of governors on a weekday evening when it was pouring buckets of rain. Mark was away for military service again, but the boys and I showed the group around the house so that they could take a look around their old home once more. We ended up relaxing in the pool house where everyone told stories of the hijinks from their time there.
Jim Edwards told of an inmate who chased another with a knife from the kitchen before disappearing on Jim’s bicycle, never to be seen again. During our tenure, inmates from the Department of Corrections worked almost exclusively outside on the grounds, but in earlier years the house was staffed inside and out with inmates, often then referred to as trustees. We heard about inmates picking locks on the refrigerator for a governor who was hungry and of inmates actually teaching some of these boys how to shoot guns. Imagine that!
One man remembered when there were goats on the property and others told of getting drunk in the pool house or with the security detail when they were teenagers living there. One told of a faux pas he made in front of the press, cameras rolling, when he mistakenly ate the fancy pat of butter, thinking it was a mint. They all recalled sliding wildly down the banister and attending parades and festivals all over the state. Michael Hollings recounted his mother’s request that a trustee bring in his new baby brother to show to the dinner guests at the formal dining table. When the trustee arrived, he presented baby brother Fritz to the guests on a silver platter.
Like veterans of the same battles, the men and boys at the gathering also compared notes on their time spent in the shadow of a father who was governor.
Staying True Page 11
