Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 26, 1993 TAG: 9312240002
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
SUSAN ALLEN rolls her eyes when asked about life before George.
What's the relevance, she wants to know. She becomes suspicious - instinctively his protector.
Could this make George look bad?
Finally, she dismisses the subject. It's trivial, as trivial as the cowboy boots George wears that often get more attention than the issues he stands for. "Who cares?" she says of her before-George past.
She won't even tell her age. (She's 32. George is 41.)
"Old enough to be married to the governor of Virginia," is her stock answer.
Still, before George - before becoming his protector and political asset - there was Susan Brown, the middle child of a middle-class family who grew up with dirt under her fingernails, yet was voted best-looking girl of her high school class. This is a fact she is almost embarrassed to acknowledge.
She also was a cheerleader, she reluctantly admits.
Her father is Larry Brown, a retired Marine pilot who expected a certain toughness from his children, she says. He did two tours of duty in Vietnam, and she recalls spending many nights as a child wondering whether he was alive or dead.
It was an experience that gives her perspective today as a political spouse and mother.
"At least George isn't off at war," she says.
Growing up, after her father returned from Vietnam, she also remembers summer weekends spent at the family cabin on the Shenandoah River. He refused to equip it with indoor plumbing or even an outhouse. If anybody needed to use the bathroom, he sent them into the woods.
When he retired from the Marines and settled in Charlottesville, Susan was in the sixth grade. He took a year off to build their house, enlisting his three children as laborers. Hence the dirt under her fingernails. Hard work builds character, he told them.
"He was pretty hard-core," Susan says. "Life was not easy."
At the same time, she says he liked his girls to be girls. Susan has a younger sister, and when they dressed up for dances or dates, he was always the first to bestow compliments. He bought them horses. He wasn't one of these men who kept his military rank as part of his name after leaving the Marines, she says.
By high school, Susan was ready for her independence. In the ninth grade, she started working, first as a Shoney's hostess and then at several clothing stores. Working kept her out of trouble, she says.
It also helped her go to the college of her choice, the University of South Carolina in Columbia, a school her father didn't exactly endorse. He believed Virginia's colleges were adequate, so his rule was that if she wanted to go out of state, then she had to cover the additional costs, including finding transportation back home.
"I'd go to the ride board and head north."
In Columbia, she settled into another routine of hard work, logging 40 hours a week at the campus bookstore, while maintaining a full course load. She pledged a sorority, but declined to join when her roommate was not accepted. Her major was marketing.
"It was great to be away," she says of South Carolina.
Again, it was also an experience that helps her now in political life. She says a dependent person would be miserable married to a politician who is gone all the time, whereas she thrives on the independence.
But talking about herself doesn't come easy.
Clearly, as her eyes roll with the questions, it is less-than-comfortable territory. "Who cares how old I am?" she says. "I don't sit around analyzing myself," she says. "It's boring."
"That's life before George. I told you life after George is much more interesting."
The story goes that life with George began with a telephone call from her parents in 1982, when she was at college. It was election time, and her parents, who normally didn't get excited about politics, were raving about a new, young candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates.
George Allen, the son of a famous football coach. A Republican.
And good-looking, her mother said.
So, by absentee ballot, Susan voted for him.
The following spring, they met by chance at a horse race outside Charlottesville when she was home from school. He made an impression on Susan. She remembered him as tall - he stands 6'4" - and friendly. But that was all. She had a boyfriend at the time and a year of studying left in Columbia. Also, George was married.
A year later, they met again by chance at the same horse races.
This time, she had a fresh diploma in hand and a new job in Charlottesville. He was going through a divorce. (His first wife reportedly couldn't stomach politics.) The only hitch was Susan's boyfriend.
George ended up giving her a ride home anyway. They talked a long time, mostly about politics.
Soon after, he asked her to go to the Kentucky Derby with him. She declined, not sure of his divorce status. Then he asked her on a General Assembly VIP canoe trip down the New River. This time, after confirming the divorce, she accepted.
"Spending all day with him on the river was the day I was hit by lightning," she says. It was also when she realized her boyfriend of four years was history. She split from him upon arriving back in Charlottesville.
She isn't sure now whether George dunked them that day on the river, but it wouldn't surprise her if he had. He has a knack for flipping canoes, she says. She recalls another canoe trip when he was standing up fishing as the canoe drifted swiftly toward some rapids. She was yelling about rocks and rushing water. George was yelling, "One more cast!" "One more cast!"
The river won out.
"He likes living on the edge a little bit," she says. Her nickname for him is "Mr. Adventure."
It wasn't exactly a typical romance.
Instead of dinners and movies, they went more to political functions. She says George wanted to see if she could tolerate them. It was a natural match. In Charlottesville, she worked in hotel convention sales, a job that requires someone who likes to network and meet new people.
"I loved everything that he did in relation to politics," she says.
Once again, he made an impression. At parties, people gravitated toward George, she says. He was laid-back, friendly to everyone and as equally at ease with the black-tie set as the pig-roast crowd. She liked his "goofy" sense of humor.
He proposed on bended knee at a mountain overlook above Charlottesville on New Year's Eve 1985. They married the following June at Ash Lawn, the home of President James Monroe, where Susan's mother works as a tour guide.
George's father was best man. Susan's sister was maid of honor. About 250 people attended.
And of course, Mr. Adventure wore his boots.
"He was married in his cowboy boots. He'll be buried in his cowboy boots," Susan says.
It is all part of the good ol' boy image George has acquired for himself over the years, an image Susan seems to accept, but not entirely embrace.
At an interview earlier this month at George's law office in Charlottesville, Susan was embarrassed that a spittoon had been left out for the press to see. George's fondness for dipping snuff is almost as well-known as his maverick footwear.
Susan doesn't particularly like her husband's tobacco habit. "A habit's a habit," she says.
But she doesn't hound him about it.
"I don't want to be a nagging wife," she says.
Then there is the log home in Earlysville where they live. It was George's before they were married. It's on 10 acres in the woods outside Charlottesville off a dirt road. It's very George, Susan says.
It has bats, which they battle when the animals get in the house.
"It's the only time we use our tennis rackets anymore," she says.
Flying squirrels also get into the house sometimes. Once, one landed on her in bed when George was trying to chase it outside. "It's every guy's dream," she says of their home, "like living in a hunting lodge."
It also is their one sanctuary away from the spotlight of politics, where the press is not welcome, where they retreat for rare family time with their two children. Susan would not agree to be photographed there.
In the whirlwind of George's political rise, Susan has been the dedicated spouse. While he was in the General Assembly, she often went to Richmond to help out where she could or just to observe when she couldn't.
She began working only part-time, as a substitute teacher and as a tour guide at Ash Lawn, so that she could get away to Richmond more easily. During George's short-lived stint in Congress, Susan was again a constant presence.
"It was almost as if she was another member of the staff," said John Goolrick, who served on George's congressional staff in the Fredericksburg district office. "It's one of those sort of ideal arrangements."
During the governor's race, Susan was a tireless campaigner. She was gone five and six days a week, usually in the opposite part of the state from George. Often, she made more appearances in a day than he did.
A nanny stayed home with the children.
Mark Obenshain, who headed the Allen campaign in Rockingham County, recalled a trip Susan made to the Rockingham County Fair with the county sheriff and several Republican members of the board of supervisors. By the end, they were all fanning themselves in the summer heat, while Susan was still going strong. "She left them behind in the dust," he says.
Her parents also campaigned hard for George.
Susan is seen as equally driven as George - and at times tougher.
Indeed, she says she is a tougher judge of people and character. She is more suspicious of hidden motives and she is quick to steer George away from someone she feels leery about. "I try to guard him," she says.
George, on the other hand, is more forgiving and slower to judge, she says.
He isn't naive, though. When he was a student at the University of Virginia and his father was coaching the Washington Redskins, other students sometimes tried to buddy up to him when what they really wanted was free Redskins tickets. "I think he's grown up with that to a degree," Susan says.
She helped cement his decision to run for governor, she says, after offering her own analysis of the political climate. To her, Mary Sue Terry looked beatable and there were not any other younger Republicans who seemed eager to run.
"I said your time is now."
But it wasn't her idea, she says. George was politically ambitious long before she came along.
As Virginia's first lady, she plans to promote children's issues and tourism as her primary public causes over the next four years. This could be particularly important to Western Virginia, where tourism is seen as a potential growth industry.
However, she is short on specifics about how she plans to promote either of her causes. She says only that she wants to work quietly behind the scenes. It is clear she has no intention to overstep her bounds. "I do not want to be Hillary," she says.
As first lady, she also will oversee the Governor's Mansion, with its household staff of 10 people and an annual operating budget of $382,000. It could be interesting to see whether this staff is reduced now, given George's repute for being cheap.
His former staffer in Fredericksburg, Goolrick tells the story of the time Susan sent George out for toothpaste and he returned with baking soda, saying it works the same, plus it's cheaper. She sent him out again.
Their children, Tyler, 5, and Forrest, 2, also will be a priority.
In Richmond, Tyler will attend Short Pump Elementary School in Henrico County. This fall, she had been enrolled at a school in Albemarle County. Susan says they will move to a Richmond hotel before the Jan. 15 inauguration so that Tyler can begin next semester in her new school.
Since election day, the children have had to adjust to having around-the-clock security from the state police, which will continue the next four years. Forrest calls them "the mans," except for one of the woman troopers, whom he calls, "Trudy-Honey." He also has discovered they are an easy mark for candy.
So far, she says the children have coped well.
During the campaign, Tyler cried at a Mary Sue Terry television commercial that showed a handgun being shot, followed by a picture of her father. "She thought they were trying kill George," Susan says.
Even in a moment like that, though, she never doubted whether his run for governor was worth it. She deeply believes in George, and she says no matter what happens, as a family, they will stick together.
In fact, the next four years should be their most stable, she says, even with the pressures of living in the public spotlight. Between running for Congress, then losing his seat to redistricting and running for governor, they haven't spent much time all under the same roof.
Her eyes light up at the prospect.
"I can't wait," she says. "This is going to be so much fun."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB