TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2010


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S Shriver charts a path from one reign to another shriver from C1


De Niro. She and her producer laughed about it. De Niro didn’t. Shriver’s present-day reconsideration of the merits of interviews makes Team Maria stiffen. Later, the Team will make apologies — “Maria hates talking about herself.” But, for now, the Team looks, well, uneasy.


Shriver has, as they say in the TV biz, “presence.” Her cheeks rise enviably, forming two corners of an isosceles trian- gle with a sharply pointed chin at the tip of a face that is all angles. Bone structure, she’s got. She dresses casual cool, show- ing up for a walk-through at the health- care event in stylish slate-colored cowboy boots and returning the next day in black leather boots and a purple tee with rib- bon embellishments, her long mane tamed by a plastic clip. Friends and relatives invariably de- scribe her as monumentally compassion- ate and charming, giving and driven, and they almost always add “tough.” She “eats people up and spits them out,” says Shriv- er’s friend, Jillian Manus, a high-octane literary agent and a guiding light of the “Broad Squad” of successful women. Timothy Shriver, head of the Special Olympics, an organization founded by their mother, describes his only sister as “a hugely powerful human being.” In their matriarchal family, “Maria’s at the head of the table.” He and his three broth- ers form the “column of ducks following the matriarch.”


At this moment in the arena in Long Beach, the matriarch grasps for control of the uncontrollable. The fundamental conceit of an interview is that the inter- viewer decides what to ask. But Shriver wants to assemble ducks in rows. “That’s enough,” she snaps at the photographer Team Maria has sanctioned to join the in- terview. He’s far from a paparazzo, but Shriver affects the demeanor of the be- sieged starlet ambushed outside a Los Angeles nightclub. In fact, asking a question that Shriver


doesn’t want to answer can almost be in- terpreted as an act of aggression. “People are always trying to get you off what you’re trying to do,” she says. They’ll pes- ter, “ ‘When’s the next book?’ ” she says. “People are very focused on what’s next. I’m trying to focus on the achievement of this day.”


Shriver suggests some questions that would be proper to ask her: “Is this well- run?” she wonders rhetorically about her “Modern House Call,” a precisely orches- trated and orderly event that provides free dental work, health screenings and financial advice to hundreds of needy women. “Is it right to do it? Is it sustain- able?” she says. The interviewee tries to become the in-


terviewer and the interviewee. So I play along and ask all the questions that Shriver suggests. I’m interested to know what she wants me to know, but also to watch her assume the role of questioner and answerer, as if she’s conducting a sit- down with a ventriloquist-doll version of herself. After running through the list — yes,


it’s well-run and it’s right to do it; it’s not only sustainable but could be taken na- tionwide — she declares without a hint of irony: “We’re having a mind-meld.”


Looking to the future


What’s next? One wonders why this is such a diffi-


cult question in Maria World. Shriver the storyteller gives hints in fragments and quips scattered over the years. Membership in the closest thing to an America royal family comes with expec- tations. The first assumption was always that Shriver would run for office. “People have been asking that since before first grade,” Shriver says at the arena in Long Beach.


She celebrated her fifth birthday two


days before her uncle, John F. Kennedy, was elected president. Two uncles — JFK and Robert F. Kennedy — had been assas- sinated before she was 13. When she was 16, she was tagging along with the vice presidential campaign of her father, Sar- gent Shriver, now 94 and grappling with Alzheimer’s.


She writes in “Ten Things” that people told her “to get out of denial, stop fight- ing the family tradition, and go into poli- tics.” Looking back, she really “did not like growing up in a political family,” Shriver tells the audience last week at her annual women’s conference. She dreamed of anchoring a network


television show, having become en- tranced by the reporting life while trav- eling in the press section during her fa- ther’s campaign. Everyone thought that “she was nuts.” “We came from the run-the-program


part of the family; the others came from the run-for-office part of the family,” Shriver’s brother Bobby says one after- noon at a benefit for Project360, an ap- parel and accessories company that sup- ports Alzheimer’s research and other causes. The company was co-founded by Maria’s teenage son Patrick Schwarze- negger, whose six-pack abs have already become objects of tabloid fascination. As Maria veered from the family biz, she demonstrated certain instincts. “She had judgment about people who were young, who were very talented and hard- working, but before they were famous,” Bobby says. While working at a television station in Baltimore, she began an endur- ing friendship with another young wom- an with big small-screen dreams — Oprah Winfrey. She also met her future husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had been a champion bodybuilder and was launching an acting career, before he achieved international action-movie superstardom. Bobby Shriver, now mayor of Santa


JONATHAN ALCORN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST POLITICAL LIFE: Though Maria Shriver says she “did not like growing up in a political family,” she embraced the campaign of her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger.


Monica, remembers Schwarzenegger jumping at an impromptu invitation to Cape Cod, Mass. “He came without a suit- case — it was a little hard to get him prop- erly outfitted,” he says. The four Shriver boys “hazed” the new boyfriend “a lot,” Bobby recalls. A favorite tactic was drag- ging him out for night water-skiing. In 1985, the year before her marriage to


Schwarzenegger (a star-studded gala that featured Uncle Teddy dancing with Grace Jones), Maria got her biggest break, being tapped to co-anchor the “CBS Morning News” program with Forrest Sawyer. The show flopped. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales wrote that Sawyer was “part- nered on the program with Maria Shriv- er’s hair. Shriver does not look as if she cares about the answers to many ques- tions except ‘Where’s my brush?’ and ‘What time will Arnold be home?’ She sucks in her cheeks and deflates her face, looking a little like one of those cartoon characters who got slipped a dose of al- um.” In an interview, Sawyer says that “the


network execs were tugging and pulling, and it’s hard to know what’s happening and why.” Shriver’s “political savvy” helped him triangulate the chess moves, he says.


When the show was pulled, Shriver was “pissed off” and “felt sure my career, if not my life, was over,” she writes in “Ten Things.” Shriver looks back on her reac- tion as “overly dramatic,” just as she sometimes calls herself a “drama queen” and a “whiner.” In 2003, having established herself at NBC, there was more drama. Schwar- zenegger decided that he wanted to run for governor. Shriver didn’t want him to, but eventually embraced the campaign. Her friend, Manus, the literary agent, remembers a spontaneous campaign stop that Shriver insisted on making at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Al- to. “That’s what Democrats do,” Manus, an active Republican, remembers her friend telling her. “You should have seen people’s faces! They would say, ‘I’m abso- lutely voting for Maria!’ I’d say, ‘Don’t you mean, Arnold?’ And they’d say, ‘Maria!’ ” Schwarzenegger’s victory celebration was “an out-of-body experience,” Shriver says. She smiled at his side, but her inner voice was saying, “What in the name of God just happened? This is a disaster.” Two months after Schwarzenegger’s inauguration, Shriver quit her job as a “Dateline NBC” reporter because of con- cerns within the network about her serv- ing in public office while being a journal- ist. “She felt like, ‘What the hell hap- pened?’ ” Bobby Shriver says. “Whenever I see [former NBC chief] Jeff Zucker, I tell him, ‘You’re so smart? You’re the guy who fired Maria.’ He says, ‘No, I didn’t.’ And I say, ‘Yes, you did. You made a lot of dumb decisions, but that was the dumbest.’ ” So, at age 49, the Kennedy kin who


didn’t want to go into the family biz was suddenly in the family biz — all the way. You can just hear her saying it to herself: “What’s next?”


Media circuses


It’s a cloudy Saturday morning in Southern California. The radio has tired of Lindsay Lohan, but is warming to Charlie Sheen. Yes, she’s going to rehab again; no, he’s not. Lohan mania escapes Shriver. She


scoffs when asked what she thinks about all the hubbub. “What sorts of stations are you listening to?” she asks. When I tell her the Lohan story was all over KNX 1070 News Radio, the respected CBS sta- tion, she merely shrugs. Shriver was so piqued by the media circus surrounding the death of Anna Nicole Smith that she said she called NBC and said that she would not be returning to network news. Back at the pyramid in Long Beach, a guy in a T-shirt that says “Floor Leader” is poised at the bottom of a steep staircase waiting for Shriver’s second visit, this time with her husband and the media in tow. A door swings open at the top, and Schwarzenegger saunters through in a blue blazer with red, white and blue-


mouth to the ears of the few who listened. Shriver relishes that same opportunity. As a journalist, she tells the crowd at her women’s conference, she was the “messenger of other people’s truths.” What’s next for her seems more likely to be more about her truths. More than 14,000 women pack the Long Beach Con- vention Center for the conference — they arrive in power suits and pumps, too busy checking BlackBerrys to be impressed by Goldie Hawn sauntering into the arena or the lines of limousines and chauffeur- driven town cars.


ROBYN BECK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES


FEMALE LEADERS: First lady Michelle Obama joined Shriver at her annual women’s conference in October.


striped lining. He’s heavily entouraged — a couple of military commanders, securi- ty (“They’re California Highway Patrol,” one woman says. “Sooo much better- dressed than Secret Service.”), the seri- ously upstaged mayor of Long Beach, Shriver and another teenage son, Chris- topher Schwarzenegger, in track shorts and a T-shirt. He obliges Mom as she brushes the hair out of his eyes. Schwarzenegger, Shriver and their pos- se stroll down the steps, moving slowly as the crowd shuffles about below, gawkers sliding past the rows of dentist’s chairs and the counseling table for the “un- banked” poor who don’t have checking accounts, angling for the best view. Schwarzenegger keeps things light, join- ing Shriver for a group hug with an elder- ly community activist. “I see a lotttt of sweet sugar here!” he says flirtily. An elderly woman manages to stop the


governor for a few moments and hands him an envelope to pass to Shriver, but she’s right behind him and he makes a quick handoff. On the outside, the wom- an, Cynthia Sims, has written “Govern- ess.” Shriver smiles. “Yes, that’s me,” she says, chirpily. Women, in particular, are drawn to her. She has a gift for making them feel comfortable, dissolving the awkwardness that can sometimes enve- lope a celebrity encounter.


Growing up in a political family may


have been a burden to Shriver, but her pedigree is part of what makes her public love her. “She’s beautiful. And she comes from such a great family,” gushes Sandra Calvio, a volunteer. “Comes from a long line of Kennedys!” says Denise Johnson, who has come by for a few free services. “Her whole family has been giving to the public for generations,” says Dell Goo- drick, a volunteer dentist. Shriver’s image beams down from a


large banner across the aisle. It has been almost seven years since she became first lady of California. On her first day, Manus recalls, “a handful of us were sitting in the first lady’s office. [Shriver] looked


JONATHAN ALCORN/BLOOMBERG NEWS


OLD FRIENDS: Oprah Winfrey and Shriver met years ago when the former journalist was working in Baltimore.


around and said, ‘There is nothing here.’ There was no paper, no pens, no ledger. . . . She looked at us and said, ‘What do we have to work with?’ ” Shriver, once again, would have to de-


cide “What’s next?” She wasn’t going to be telling the story — she was the story. “The short answer is: brutal,” Timothy Shriver says of the emotional effect of the transition on his sister. “The longer an- swer is that she tried to use it to help peo- ple.” Before her first year in office had end- ed, she found herself accused of a “power grab” when she tried to reinvent a strug- gling history museum to focus on wom- en. Shriver eventually agreed to a broad- er focus, but the controversy lingered. Tom Stallard, one of three board mem- bers who resigned in protest, says he ad- mires Shriver, but “we were hoping for her help, not realizing that it would come with a complete change in direction.” Shriver responded to the criticism by writing a column, touting attendance gains and dismissing any notion of a “sin- ister power grab.”


“I am a journalist and facts are a part of


my life,” she wrote. The storyteller clings to her old identi- ty, even as she is establishing a new one.


The messenger A year ago, at the Special Olympics Winter Games, Shriver was watching as one of the athletes struggled to be heard over the buzz of an audience that chatted and mingled, essentially ignoring the woman’s speech. When she finished, Shriver grabbed the microphone and took control: “All of you just missed one of the great examples of courage. She had the guts, the strength to stand here and tell her story,” Timothy Shriver remem- bers her saying. “You could hear a pin drop in the room


after that,” he says. The story that Shriver was so irked about the audience missing was un- filtered. Straight from the athlete’s


Shriver super-sized the conference, once a sleepy affair, leveraging her mega- wattage friendships to assemble a list of speakers and panelists that includes the two most recent first ladies — Michelle Obama and Laura Bush — not to mention Oprah and Mary J. Blige, former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor and ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer. The conference — which supports


Shriver’s “We Programs,” which give out scholarships and have distributed more than $1 million in micro-loans to women- owned businesses — is a heady blend of life-/career-counseling and commerce. When the women aren’t getting advice from Suze Orman (“the Lady Gaga of Fi- nance”) or Kym Douglas (“the MacGyver of Beauty”) and others, they are stuffing shopping bags and swiping credit cards in a vast hall set up with hundreds of booths hawking everything from jewelry to an $8,000 gadget that combines a crys- tal rod and computer software into a “tool for awakening positive vibrational change.” In the bookstore, women feast on offerings from the Kennedy Diaspora Industrial Complex, with titles from Shriver; her cousin Caroline Kennedy; and her daughter Katherine Schwarze- negger. Many at the conference wonder what will happen to the event when Shriver leaves office. There’s that question again —“What’s next?” In her speech, Shriver says she knows


that it’s time to make choices, but she’s “afraid” to move forward without her mother’s advice. The women in the hall — affluent, ambitious, successful — are, in some respects, the world’s greatest focus group. Shriver asks herself the question that she can’t bear hearing from others. It’s almost as if she’s thinking aloud. Per- haps, she says, she’ll do her “own wom- en’s conference.” Right on cue, she gets her answer. The audience cheers her on. roigfranzia@washpost.com


To see more photos of Maria Shriver in action at the “Modern House Call for


Women” conference, visit washingtonpost. com/style.


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JONATHAN ALCORN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST FAMILY LIFE: Shriver’s sons, Patrick, left, and Christopher, also do charitable work.


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