One night, while I was tucking her in, rather than say what I was thinking—How in the name of everything that is holy could anyone not love this magical place?—I carefully said, “Honey, this isn’t prison; we can go back if you want. I will split time between here and Virginia.” (Where we still had a home we couldn’t sell, thanks to the Obama economy.)
“But you love it here, Mom,” she replied, with true thoughtfulness. “Going back would make you so unhappy.”
This stopped me in my tracks. My sweet, young daughter had put my happiness above her own and suffered rather than cause her selfish old mother discomfort. I tried to make her understand nothing could make a mother more miserable than having an unhappy child—especially such a thoughtful and caring one. What had I done to my precious baby girl? I really was a shrew bitch from hell and not in a good way.
For Matty, or the girl whom we shall refer to as Matty—even though she has beautiful alabaster skin, naturally curly and naturally blond locks, not to mention a wit and spark that could light up any room—the transition adjustment process was completely different.
The hardest part of her arrival at the prestigious Academy of the Sacred Heart on St. Charles Avenue—grandmothers “penciled in” their unborn grandchildren when their daughters married and alumni families traced their connection to the institution to the Dark Ages—wasn’t just being an unknown nonlegacy, it was being an overly known nonlegacy legend, the daughter of James Carville.
It had always been confusing to both our girls—and uncomfortably so—that James evokes strong emotions in people; they really love him or they totally despise him. And nobody seems capable of refraining from sharing their excessive opinions about him with his daughters. He is what they call in our home state, a Louisiana legend. And the point is, while I could pretty much predict what kind of reception the mention of him would elicit, depending on where we were, the girls were always walking on eggshells.
Matty’s love and devotion to her father is deep and serious (for the most part), but she got plenty sick of hearing ad nauseam about how great he was. (And who wouldn’t?) The two of them can fight like cats and dogs (or worse, since we have regular canine-feline contretemps in our home and they are never as bad as Matty and James going at it), but when exposed to the slightest lamentations of outsiders, she defends him with fierceness and passion. Worse than either situation, though, is being prejudged as a “daughter of” rather than as her own unique person.
To make matters worse, in those early days of our new life, James was in the local newspaper almost every day, a daily paper with 68 percent readership penetration. He was on a warpath to save New Orleans, fix New Orleans, heal New Orleans and be there for New Orleans. The man loves this city; every person here loves this special place. But barely a day passed without everyone reading about Citizen James Carville in the Times Pic before they brushed their teeth in the morning, which made every day another fresh new hell for Matty.
Which she kept to herself, of course, to avoid hurting our feelings. But no one had to tell her mother. Matty’s heart beat in mine. Both Matty’s and Emerson’s did. And, by my reckoning, the pain and suffering of the opening days of their new life were frying their tender hearts to a crisp. What kind of selfish, heinous parents would drag their happy young girls from their own paradise to one that was ours? Confronting this question provoked the most heart-searing and painful mother moments I’ve experienced.
Some of the pain was made worse by the uniform.
The Catholic girls’ school uniform.
This part is not fiction: Catholic girls’ school uniforms are itchy, sweaty, ugly, stiff and too long—oppressive Christian-style burkas that require so little care or cleaning that they can be slept in and worn the next day, looking spotless and smooth. All you have to do is get out of bed and scrunch your unbrushed, dreadlockian hair into one of two ubiquitous styles: the high bun or the low bun. That completed “the look.”
At first, when the girls complained about the uniform, I defended it. It seemed like a high-performance protective shield along the lines of Harry’s cloak of invisibility.
My argument was that if every girl looks exactly the same, from all threads down to the shoelaces, then wouldn’t all girls effectively disappear? (And what about the furniture people in Sherlock Holmes? If the uniform didn’t render complete invisibility, wasn’t it good enough to just blend in? Heck, even Dr. Watson didn’t recognize his famous detective partner.)
The girls were fans of Harry and Holmes but, like teenage girls from any planet, did not see the particular relevance of them to their own sartorial existence.
Matty, always favoring efficiency over fussiness in her wardrobe, quickly came to worship her uniform—customizing it with handsome ink drawings, strategic rips, a triple-wrapped waistband. But Emerson, a fashionista from birth, never stopped loathing such undistinguished garb. Her painstaking attention to dressing always rivaled that of Renaissance master painters.
And there was no comfort in being reminded that, in Emerson’s previous existence back in Virginia, there were years and years of mornings where she said, “I don’t have anything to wear, Mom,” while peering into a closet as big and messy as Filene’s Basement, and years of coming downstairs to model completely different, fully accessorized outfits with the “how does this look” look on her face. To which I always replied, “Just darling, darling,” which turns out to be the totally not right thing to say.
Each morning of our old life culminated in the old mother nag having to shout, “Girl, you are not going out of the house in that!” while I was slaving over a hot breakfast. (The girls may tell you this entire chapter is complete fiction, but they can’t deny under oath that they were often served my famous breakfast of champions—Kraft mac and cheese and canned pork and beans—even if it wasn’t always piping hot.)
Time heals all. If only I had listened to my own internal maternal voice telling me that in those early days in New Orleans. Instead, I got caught up in bribery, in taking the girls on multiple shopping extravaganzas (did I mention Catholic girls need a lot of clothes?), spa days, getaways, return trips to Virginia, as well as helping to plan massive sleepovers in hopes of helping them settle in—none of which Matty remotely wanted or Emerson needed. So as the new gravitational force set in, peace did not reign in the land of our fictional solar system.
In a classic bit of overreaction, with only a few strands of hair left unpulled from her already dwindling, graying mane, our fictional mother resorted to the nuclear option: transition counseling. I sought out, found and put us in the hands of a real professional.
The opening chapter of our little fictional tale concludes: After one session, the professional transition counselor calls in the overwrought mother and says, “Mrs. Carville”—even though her real last name is Matalin—“your daughters are fine; you are nuts.”
Okay then.
JAMES
I KNEW MARY WAS NUTS A LONG TIME AGO, but I loved her in spite of it—and probably because of it.
When we tied the knot back in 1993, a lot of people thought it was some kind of stunt marriage. They wouldn’t exactly come up and tell you that to your face. But we knew. We heard the whispers.
Mary and I had a big raucous wedding on Thanksgiving Day in New Orleans. We led a dancing, swinging jazz parade through the French Quarter. Bystanders threw Mardi Gras beads down from the balconies. Imagine Rush Limbaugh and Paul Begala waltzing down Bourbon Street at the same time. It was a hell of a lot of fun.
But I think the general feeling among some people was that this was a great party, a nice wedding, but also kind of a big joke. We’ll all have a good time, have a good laugh, and then move on to the next thing. It never would last.
It wasn’t like that at all, not for me.
One of my most satisfying moments came the next year when the book Mary and I had written about the 1992 campaign came
out. We’d called it All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President.
Jonathan Yardley, the influential critic at the Washington Post, had gone on a rant when Random House and Simon & Schuster had announced they would jointly publish the book as a political and romantic memoir. He’d called it “a nonevent staged in order to announce the impending arrival of a nonbook.” He said it was “virtually certain” that the book would be a dud and that “hype is really the only thing that matters in an enterprise such as this one.”
When the book finally came out and we saw that he’d reviewed it, we expected to just get slaughtered. But here’s what he wrote: “Fry it or bake it, broil it or barbecue it: No matter how you cook your crow, it’s still an indigestible meal. But when it’s the only dish on the table, there’s no choice except to suck it up and chow down.” He called the book “entertaining, engaging and—here comes the fattest piece of crow—interesting.”
I sent Yardley a bottle of Old Crow whiskey with a note that said, “Better to drink crow than eat crow.”
What he didn’t understand—what a lot of people haven’t understood over the years—is that our marriage never was a stunt. Sure, we have the Republican-versus-Democrat dynamic, sleeping with the enemy, however you want to describe it. It’s true that I don’t agree with her politics, but we agree on plenty of other things. And what two married people have ever been exactly alike? How boring.
I got married when I was forty-nine years old. It’s the first and only time I’ve ever been married. I didn’t enter into that lightly. This never was a lark for us. We knew what we were getting into, and we stuck with it.
A lot of people have eaten a lot of crow about that over the years.
MARY
I CONFESS THAT I AM NOT completely unsympathetic to the cognoscenti who were skeptical about our blessed union—even the ones who had never met us but confidently accused us of pulling off what they were certain was nothing more than a sideshow gimmick. To them, ours was a tawdry low-life romance and “stunt marriage” designed to get positive press attention. As one critic wrote in a book review in the Washington Post in 1996:
Political consultants have long cultivated the press through leaking and quippery; in 1992 Carville went them one better by flaunting his own eccentricity and pouring out lyrical streams of expletives. His stunt marriage to Republican operative Mary Matalin, and his stunt book about his stunt marriage, only underscored the point. If Carville outshone others in his field, it was a through his genius for self-promotion.
It’s not as though contemporary culture doesn’t produce a steady parade of look-at-me marriages—or prop children—at least the “culture” heralded by the East Coast elite and the West Coast arbiters of fine Hollywood taste does. In turn, this cockeyed value system is pumped into the American cultural bloodstream around the clock. And considering what most of America has no choice but to consume in mass-media products—thanks to the Barnum and Bailey world of “infotainment”—why would anybody think we were real people with real convictions and a real marriage, or even real children? So “stunt life” became our “narrative.”
Our romance didn’t become public by some master Machiavellian plan, or even with our consent, originally. We were just two longtime trench-warfare politicos whose paths crossed by chance, two people who had more in common due to the nature of their work and passion than most normal people, even though we happened to be true believers in diametrically opposing political philosophies, which, by the way, is way less unique in the real world than is commonly claimed.
And then, like a bad random traffic accident, we found ourselves in love and together at the same time that we were both lucky enough, and hardworking enough, to be chosen as campaign pooh-bahs in opposite camps in an epic battle for the presidency in 1992.
James led the charge for the wayward, I-never-inhaled, Southern-fried-but-elite-educated, liberal-in-centrist’s-sheepskin candidate, Bill Clinton. I was the one who stood by the ultimate statesman, an honest man and lifelong public servant, George H. W. Bush—aka “Poppy” to me—the fantastic, accomplished incumbent who deserved victory but had it snatched away by a perfect storm generated by a next-gen Southern stud and an old-gen crackpot, Ross Perot.
Due to the length of presidential campaigns, the media found it had to fill an inordinate amount of airtime and column inches. There are only so many scintillating diversions to cover in the daily grind of an endless campaign with its nauseatingly repetitive stump speeches and canned talking points, even though no one could deny what, between Clinton and Perot, 1992 was stacking up to be not your predictable garden–variety presidential contest.
I guess in that context a seemingly impossible romance between two oddballs was a juicy press tidbit, gussied up to be the story of a modern-day Romeo and Juliet on the road to the White House.
I would not deny we were, and remain, offbeat creatures. I would also not deny we are unlikely celebrities. But we didn’t plan it, nor did we encourage or discourage it; we just went with it. From our perspective, coverage was coverage and we were always trying to disseminate the messages of our respective sides as far and wide as possible, by whatever vehicle available. There didn’t seem to be much wrong in that. Any sane pol could (and should) take easy access to media for their candidate. But in the end, becoming famous or, in our case, mostly infamous—even mildly so—is a life-changing thing and can feel like you’ve both won and lost the lottery at the same time.
2.
Fame, Failure and TV
JAMES
I DON’T THINK THAT I had any idea the day before Bill Clinton was elected what life would be like the day after. It wasn’t like anybody sat me down and said, “Starting tomorrow, you’re going to be famous.” Nobody prepares you for that transition.
Right after Clinton won, I came back to Washington and picked up Mary, and we went to Venice. We both needed a vacation after such a long, grueling campaign, and we’d planned to take that trip no matter who won. But when we got to Italy, there were paparazzi camped out there waiting for me. It was insane.
When I got back to Washington, everybody was calling me for interviews. Or inviting me to dinner parties. That sort of thing. Katie Couric had my mother on the Today show, which was an awfully big deal back home. Then there was the inauguration itself. It was all very heady stuff.
I’d spent the better part of fifty years being anonymous, like anyone else walking down the street. I was thirty-three years old before I ever went to Washington, D.C., or New York. I was forty-two before I won my first political campaign. All of a sudden, that anonymity had vanished, and I was being hailed around town as the guy who engineered Bill Clinton’s improbable run for president.
The first real celebrity political consultant was probably Lee Atwater back during the 1980s, who was a mentor and dear friend to Mary. Michael Deaver was pretty well-known back during the Reagan days. Both of them had become famous in political circles, but they never really became famous in the larger world.
Things had changed by the time I arrived in Washington. Clinton’s election coincided with the rise of cable television and nonstop, around-the-clock news. He was the first baby boomer president, which brought with it another layer of hype. In many ways, my own fame arose out of that new media environment and all the attention being showered on a new, young president.
The only kind of fame I’d ever sought was to be respected in my own little world of political consultants. Even before 1992, I’d won a bunch of races—Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, Frank Lautenberg in New Jersey, Wallace Wilkinson in Kentucky, Zell Miller in Georgia, Harris Wofford in Pennsylvania—and I’d built a solid name for myself in the business. I always dreamed about making a name for myself professionally. But this was something else entirely.
MARY
I’VE WORKED ROUTINELY at home from the time I could walk and outside the home since I was eleven. Working is what our family
did. Our credo was everybody had to pitch in and nobody got anything for nothing. And by the time I was an adult, work was the only thing I was reasonably good at.
Not just any kind of working, but a very specific narrow kind of working: I kept getting drawn to intense, driven, seven-days-a-week, warp-speed, hyperconnected work situations, getting lost completely in nonstop pressure and being on call every second of the day.
My whole life had been structured—my whole adult life, even before graduating from college—around high-pressure situations. That was what I loved and knew. When I was working on a campaign, every day had purpose and meaning and a quantifiable objective, namely, to fight with every fiber in every cell to elect good solid conservatives. Sometimes you lose and it’s devastating. But the fight goes on. I never planned for the next job. Another campaign would always materialize.
That’s one of the beautifully reliable things about politics. A campaign ends, you take a breath, maybe you get a vacation. You pay all the credit card bills and mortgage payments that you missed while you were in the trenches, and you call your friends who have almost forgotten you exist. But before you have time to call all of them or get your big backside reverse engineered into shape—or even before you join a gym—there’s another campaign. And you jump on it like a moving train. In no time at all you are miles away from your home and life and mortgage payments. Maybe it doesn’t sound like it, but it’s a beautiful thing.
Except in 1993. There was no beauty. There was no moving train to jump onto. For the deputy campaign director for Bush 41, losing the presidential election was the kind of loss that people don’t recover from quickly in Washington, D.C., or least they didn’t then.
That particular loss made me the poster child for failure and disgrace.
A year before, Poppy Bush had been a beloved president. Everybody enjoyed his amusing antics and thought he was a charming, stately, earnest, honest, accomplished shoo-in for reelection, a reelect campaign we kicked off with a 91 percent approval rating.
Love & War Page 4
