Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 16, 1994 TAG: 9405170046
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CARYN JAMES NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
One of the things most people know about President Clinton's mother is that she spent every day she could making $2 bets. Another is a family secret her son turned to strong political advantage during the campaign: She was physically beaten by her alcoholic second husband, Roger Clinton, until the teen-age Bill set his stepfather straight.
And just a week before she died of breast cancer, on Jan. 6, Kelley got one of her final wishes, to see Barbra Streisand in Las Vegas.
In the pantheon of saintly presidential first mothers, Virginia Kelley came from the wrong side of the tracks: the earthly side. That is precisely what makes her so much more endearing than any other, so much easier for average Americans to identify with.
Her perfectly titled autobiography, ``Leading With My Heart,'' is a shrewd exercise in image-making. Yet it is also a convincing portrait of a profusely warm and tough-minded woman who was widowed three times.
She survived bad luck with men, petty town gossip and so many family disasters in her 70 years that she writes, ``My life was too much like a country song.''
Along the way, the book reveals something about the political success of the first pop-culture president. When Bill Clinton imitated Elvis or played the saxophone on talk shows during the campaign, he knew the people in his audience well and addressed them without condescension. They were just like his mother.
``Leading With My Heart'' was actually written by James Morgan, a free-lance magazine writer. He interviewed Kelley, her family (including her fourth husband, Dick Kelley, and the president) and many friends, who often provided facts and reminiscences that Kelley, with an admittedly weak memory for detail, had forgotten. She had seen two-thirds of the manuscript and an outline of the rest before she died.
The book frequently falls back on phrases like ``as Toni Karber puts it'' or ``Carolyn Staley recalls,'' giveaways that Morgan has relied on a friend's interview. But if the voice sometimes sounds too professionally packaged, the positive sentiments echo those for which Kelley was known.
The clever strategy is to take her image and flaunt it, beginning with her morning ritual of putting on a load of makeup. She paints on the eyebrows she never grew, glues on her false eyelashes (``Some people have said I look like a spider with these eyelashes, but I like them'' and explains that the trademark white streak in her hair first showed up when she was in high school.
There are no surprising facts; it is Kelley's down-to-earth self-image that is so refreshing. When she married Roger Clinton, she and Bill moved from Hope, Ark., to nearby Hot Springs, a raucous town known for illegal gambling.
During those days, she writes, she smoked, she went to parties and drank, she went to clubs and sometimes got up on the stage with the performers to sing along, uninvited.
She worked as a nurse anesthetist, and took great pride in a career that was a financial and emotional life raft during her troubled second marriage. It is well-known that Kelley retired after two patients died under her care. (The family of one patient sued, and her insurance company settled. In the other case, an autopsy cleared Kelley's name.)
She traces those accusations to a decades-long professional feud. It began when a doctor specializing in anesthesiology moved to Hot Springs and tried to take over business from the lowly nurse anesthetists. It was a class struggle, and Kelley bluntly complains about doctors and their ``God-complexes.''
Her behavior and opinions are thoroughly middle-American, and not what you might expect from a first mother, unless that mother had raised a son who loves to eat at McDonald's.
Even in adversity she had no interest in being a martyr. Her most obvious role model is a pop-culture heroine, Scarlett O'Hara. When she met Will Blythe, the president's father, she discovered they both loved movies. ``My favorite was `Gone with the Wind,''' she writes.
In 1993, when she first discovered through news reports that Will Blythe had been married two or three times before, she admits she was ``hurt and confused.''
But like Scarlett pledging to get Rhett back, she concludes, ``I'll go to my grave knowing I was the love of his life.'' Her third husband, a hairdresser named Jeff Dwire, reminded her of Rhett Butler.
The book weakens as it gets closer to the present. Her stories about her older son are familiar, and there is a restraint when she discusses Bill Clinton that happily doesn't apply to herself.
She makes the obvious connection that both she and Hillary Rodham Clinton are strong women, though at first they didn't get along. And she doesn't dwell on politics. The New Hampshire primary and the Gennifer Flowers scandal are reduced to: ``Bill had taken an awful beating in the media that winter.''
Her breast cancer had been discovered in 1990. By 1992, it had recurred and had spread to her spine, skull, pelvic bones and leg bones. For a long time she didn't let her sons know just how serious the cancer was. Her instructions to the doctors were, ``You tell my boys I'm fine.''
What is best about this book is Virginia Kelley's rich sense of life and her wry, self-deprecating wit.
While she was dating Roger Clinton, she recalls, they would visit friends and ``I would climb up on the counter, obviously under the influence of something like Roger's moonshine, and sing this absurd song I had made up - `I'm the Hempstead County idiot.''' She adds, ``Which I obviously was.''
She obviously was not. But you have to love her for saying so.
Leading With My Heart: By Virginia Kelley, with James Morgan. 286 pages. Simon & Schuster. $22.50.
by CNB