Daring (43 page)

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.

IN THE LATE
1980
S AND EARLY
1990
S,
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.