If anyone needed a reminder that California is under new management, Shriver, musing aloud before a gallery of hair-sprayed first ladies of the past, is it. Not because she’s a Kennedy (or as she sometimes reminds inquisitors, a Shriver), the wife of a Hollywood superstar, a former network news anchor and, let’s face it, considerably more glam than the women on the wall behind her. No, Maria Shriver is fun to watch because no one seems to have given her the first-lady handbook.
Six months into a job she admits she first dreaded, Shriver remains impulsive, unscripted–and, in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s words, “uncontained.” She bats aside the now predictable questions about her bipartisan celebrity partnership with a mixture of tartness and glee. Ask how much of her liberal Democratic influence she exerts on her Republican husband, and you’ll get an earful. “I hope we are beyond the era where people wonder if a quote ‘first lady’ talks to her husband,” Shriver says. “I would be in a really weird marriage if I didn’t talk to my husband–about everything. He asks me my opinion about everything, as I ask him.” The standard power-behind-the-throne query draws another zinger. “I’m not sitting in budget meetings, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Shriver tells a local television reporter, barely suppressing a laugh. “Arnold’s firmly in control.”
With a new book for children to promote, a jewelry line featuring California landmarks and her “Remarkable Women” exhibit, Shriver seems to be having so much fun these days, it’s easy to forget she never wanted this job in the first place. She confessed recently on “Oprah” that she cried when Schwarzenegger decided to run in last year’s recall election, and she’s made no secret of her unhappiness over leaving NBC News to avoid conflicts of interest involving her husband’s administration. While Shriver had originally hoped to stay with NBC–voluntarily staying away from political coverage–network executives became nervous when reports surfaced of her enormous influence in helping Schwarzenegger choose his staff and high-level appointees. Schwarzenegger lives in a Sacramento hotel during the week and commutes in his private Gulfstream jet, Shriver spends most of her time in Los Angeles managing the lives of the couple’s four school-age children. Since California has no governor’s mansion, Shriver has also poked around the Sacramento real-estate market, but so far, found nothing she says would be suitable for her family.
After the election, Shriver so loathed the inevitable questions about what first lady “projects” and “issues” she planned to take on that she retreated into a protective cocoon of friends and aides to keep the press at bay while she figured how to morph from blunt-spoken journalist into some sort of public figure. “I’m over it,” Shriver says of her widely publicized ambivalence about first-ladyhood. “People kept coming up to me and saying ‘I heard you don’t like the title , but I’m really proud of you as first lady and you should be, too, and so I’m like: OK. I couldn’t really think of an alternative.” While Schwarzenegger clearly revels in being called “governor,” Shriver makes no attempt at formality. When an Austrian reporter addresses her reverently as “Mrs. Shriver-Schwarzenegger,” California’s first lady grabs her by the arm, laughing. “Just call me Maria.”
That Shriver, after months behind the curtain, should now be so visible, is no coincidence. In recent weeks, Shriver been promoting her new book, “What’s Happening to Grandpa?” Intended to help children understand Alzheimer’s, the book is based on her family’s experience with her father, Sargent Shriver, who was diagnosed with the disease several years ago. At the same time, Maria and her four brothers have also embarked on a campaign to burnish their father’s legacy–one the family feels has long been overshadowed by his connection to his wife’s Kennedy clan. Shriver, a former adviser to his brother-in-law, John F. Kennedy, and running mate of George McGovern in 1972, as well as a failed presidential candidate in 1976, was the architect of many of the New Frontier’s most legendary social programs, including the Peace Corps and Head Start. Together with his wife, Eunice, the younger sister of JFK, the Shrivers established the Special Olympics. As she travels the country promoting her book, Maria is also lending her support to a new biography by Atlantic Monthly writer Scott Stossel, “Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver.”
With her father as her model, says Shriver, she hopes to use her pulpit to get young people “jazzed” about serving the state of California, regardless of their politics. “I think one of the great things about Arnold and one of the great things about my father, when he was putting together an administration, he never asked them about their political affiliation, he asked them about their ideas,” says Shriver in her characteristic torrent. “And that to me is the great thing about Arnold, he never asks where you went to school, who your parents were, what your political affiliation is. People want to find a way to help. They can’t leave their jobs to work full time for the state, but they can clean a beach, they can build for habitat for humanity, they can start a school garden, they can volunteer for Special Olympics or for after-school programs. No one asks you if you are a Democrat or a Republican when you come to serve in an organization.”
Though politics is in her DNA–or perhaps because of it–Shriver has little patience for partisanship. During her recent book tour, she sidestepped all questions about how hard Schwarzenegger would campaign for George W. Bush or whether she would support longtime family friend John Kerry. “You are never going to see and her Arnold doing [James] Carville and [Mary] Matalin,” says a friend, referring to married political consultants who often debate each other on television. “You don’t just get to scream and rail,” Shriver says of the harsh political mood gripping the country. “You have to get engaged. People tell me, ‘You should do this or you should do that.’ I always say, ‘Oh, yeah, and what are you doing?’”
In case there’s any doubt about the kind of pressure Shriver grew up with as a member of the nation’s premiere public-service family, her “Remarkable Women” tour ends with a quote from Sarge: “Break your mirrors! Yes, indeed, shatter the glass. In our society that’s so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. You’ll get more satisfaction from having improved your neighborhood, your town, your state and your fellow human beings than you’ll ever get from your figure, your car, your house or your credit rating.” Maria eyes fix briefly on her ailing father’s words, engraved in the wall above. It might seem an occasion for sentimentality, one more noble call to service. Not this first lady. “Now everyone can feel as guilty as I always did,” she cracks. With that, Maria Shriver is gone, no doubt to do something bold and worthwhile with her time.
