remember that you know me.” Whatever the thing is that has just occurred or is about to occur, it’s time- consuming; your life has never been more hectic, nor have there ever been more people contacting you for essentially pointless reasons, yet you feel compelled to respond, lest they think the attention has gone to your head. You hear from your dentist, your daughter’s high school math teacher, people from your past: childhood friends, old classmates, former coworkers. They are surprisingly skilled at tracking you down. Sometimes they merely want acknowledgment, but increasingly, they want favors, and then strangers want favors, too. They ask you to speak at events, to be an honorary host, to be a member of their board of trustees, to auction off an evening with yourself; they want tickets to baseball games, tickets to the World Series, permission to get married on the baseball field, tickets to tour the governor’s mansion; then they want you to help them gain access or entry to places to which you have no connection whatsoever, a fancy restaurant in New York, a golf course in North Carolina; they want you to help their nephew obtain a summer internship at a talent agency in Los Angeles. Before your fame extends beyond the state, they are already sure that it does. It would be impossible to say yes to all of these requests, though again, saying no increases the likelihood that you’ll be viewed as rude; almost every person who asks a favor appears unaware of the existence of every other person doing the same. You realize that anyone can create an obligation for you just by wanting something; they write you a letter or an e-mail, they leave you a phone message, and while not granting their wish is bad enough, to ignore them would be unforgivable. In this way, they determine your schedule and duties; you have become public property.
Gradually, your fame settles on you, it’s like a new coat or a new car that you become used to, but it continues to provoke odd and awkward behavior in others. At your public events, people you
knew, friends of friends of friends, your college boyfriend’s aunt, the neighbor of your plumber—they, too, claim you, reciting the few degrees of separation between you and them. At private events unrelated to you or the reason you’ve become famous, the weddings or cocktail parties or school fund-raisers you still attend to try to convince yourself you remain a regular person, other people eye you heavily. You try to be modest by not assuming anyone recognizes or is looking at you; if you’re meeting a person for the first time, you introduce yourself, you remark on the flowers or the food or the weather. But really, all they want to talk about is you: how they are connected to you (the more tenuous the connection, the more they insist on establishing it), or where they were when they saw an article or television segment featuring you, or what they overheard people on the street saying about you. They want to talk to you about how strange it must be, being famous; they don’t realize they are even now creating the strangeness.
And then you become truly famous—not locally or regionally famous, but famous famous—and of all things, your burden lightens. Steadily, your entourage has been growing, and now it is large enough and professional enough that there is a buffer between you and the rest of the world. In public, you’re flanked by aides; either visibly or invisibly, you’re accompanied by a security detail. You can’t just be approached, and the situations in which you can be approached are controlled and systematic. This is why it’s harder to be moderately famous than very famous; when you’re moderately famous, you still go to the grocery store, you still do the things you did before, while at any moment, you might be noticed and accosted. When you’re very famous, you don’t go to the grocery store unless it’s for a photo op, and you know that wherever you do go, you’ll be recognized at once. Any environment you set foot in will be altered, your presence will mean that everyone must start talking about you, taking your picture with their cell phones. This is why, during Charlie’s presidency, we have hardly eaten at restaurants in Washington except during events organized around our attendance; we’ve been criticized for being aloof when the reality is that I feel it’s unfair to all the other diners. They’ve gone out, perhaps to celebrate a job promotion or a birthday; they are buttering their bread and we appear, unsettling the equilibrium of the room. If this was to be the dinner where you celebrated your promotion, it has become instead the dinner where the president and the first lady showed up. It is selfish, really; we take up more than our fair share of oxygen.
Early on, at moments when I felt most overwhelmed by my new role as first lady, I’d tell myself that I was surely the most famous person in the country, and probably in the world, who had not sought her fame. This was a lie. Who did not
her fame would have been more accurate. I sought fame with a reluctant heart, with great reservations, yet I granted interviews and posed for photographs and rode with Charlie on buses and planes, I gave speeches of my own and cheered for his, I visited churches and hospitals and fish fries. Like every famous person, I was complicit in my fame. Yes, a few times a year, a handful of ordinary citizens become the focus of a media frenzy—a victim of a particularly grisly crime, or the kid who reaches over the stands to catch a home-run ball in a play-off game—but that fame passes. The true enduring kind must be constantly burnished and enhanced. It never happens by chance.
Perhaps it started back in 1977, with Charlie’s first congressional campaign, or perhaps well before that, when Harold Blackwell ran for attorney general of Wisconsin in 1954. We threw ourselves at people—there are more savory ways to say it, but really, that’s what we did. We searched them out, we left leaflets at the front doors of their houses and under the windshields of their cars, we spoke to them through ads on television, we went to their schools and town halls and farmers’ markets. We begged them to listen, we bombarded them with promises and plans, but all along we were selling ourselves—selling him.
We did everything we could to get as many people as possible to pay attention to us, and it worked, and now we complain.
we say.
BEFORE DELIVERING HIS
speech in Columbus, Charlie calls to say that he thinks Dena is a credibility-lacking piece of trailer trash. “Go easy,” I say. I am, as much as possible, trying to suspend panic. This scandal, if a scandal is what it will be, is in such an early stage; I need to better know the shape of it before allotting my anxious energy.
My personal aide, Ashley, and I are walking from the South Lawn into the Diplomatic Reception Room when Nicole Hethcote, another aide, says, “Mrs. Blackwell, your daughter’s on the phone. Are you available?”
“I’ll get it at my desk,” I say. In my office in the East Wing, as soon as the phone rings, I pick it up.
“Can you please make Dad go talk to that Franklin guy?” Ella says. “Just for five minutes?”
“Honey, you can’t let the opposition dictate the terms of the conversation.”
“You sound like Uncle Hank.”
Ah, my Ella. She is twenty-eight now, and her schedule at Goldman Sachs is worse than Charlie’s, ninety hours a week on a regular basis. Magazines sometimes run pictures of Ella and her boyfriend, Wyatt, entering or leaving
