California Camelot

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Is Mrs. Schwarzenegger the most powerful woman in America?

By Jeffrey S. Young

Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images 2003

Suddenly, she’s there. Maria has come to the opening of the Treasures from Hearst Castle show at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts in downtown Sacramento. It’s an evening in spring. Out in the foyer, a traditional jazz band — The Royal Society Jazz Orchestra — is jitterbugging its way through a repertoire of songs that would have been new when the Titanic went down. Members of the Sacramento Art Deco Society are dancing, adorned in full period costumes.

“Maria is here,” a reverential voice whispers. That’s Maria Shriver, the first lady of California, the Governator’s wife, niece of President John F. Kennedy and general media star. A hush settles over the room as every head turns and hundreds of pairs of eyes size up her hair (a reddish brown with visible dark-brown roots), her dress (a simple black cocktail dress with a deep neckline), her shoes (pointy Manolo pumps), her handbag (big, checked black-and-white, perhaps Gucci) and her face (lined, dark circles under deep-set eyes, high anorexic cheekbones).

In an age of overblown celebrity, plastic surgery and physical perfection for hire, she looks … well, tired, and surprisingly real.

She slips into the inner rooms of the exhibit, surrounded by cameras and retainers. This is where the big donors to her museum have been allowed to mingle, away from the hoi polloi. Flash bulbs go off, she has mastered the art of the grip and grin — reach out, flash her big smile, shake hands, move on to the next person.

However, what is really remarkable is just how very good she is at it. Her carefully cultivated image is of a suburban soccer mom who is perfectly content to stay in the shadows of her husband’s celebrity spotlight. But in person, she looks completely comfortable working the room. There’s a keen intelligence behind those eyes, an ease in public that combines with a breezy bonhomie, a dazzling smile and a pure pleasure in meeting the public that is reminiscent of the greatest politician of the second half of the 20th century: her uncle, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States.

Could it be that one of the greatest political families in American history is on the verge of engineering another remarkable coup?

Say It Soft, and It’s Almost Like Praying

AP Photo / Rich Pedroncelli

Maria Shriver is at the center of the Age of Women, perhaps the defining development of this new century. At the end of the last 100 years, The Economist decreed that the most important factor in the preceding century had been the change in the status of women — more important than the atomic bomb or penicillin. Given the rise of powerful female politicians in the past few years, there might be something to this.

Maria herself certainly understands the power of woman. At the museum that night she gives a brief speech to the assembled crowd, thanking everyone under the sun. She is easy and brief, good natured and big hearted. There’s no hint of policy wonk here — in fact, when asked earlier about her husband’s use of the word “prosperity” dozens of times in his State of the State speech, she froze up and refused to say any more. A media star, she knows how to control the story … and she has decided that the story isn’t about her, it’s all about Arnold.

At the podium she describes the reasons she got involved in the museum in the first place. “When I first came up to Sacramento, I walked through the Capitol and asked, ‘Where are the pictures of women?’ There wasn’t a single portrait of a woman,” she explains. “Well, I decided to do something about that. Now we’ve got the California Museum of History, Women and the Arts, where we can celebrate the contributions of women to the development of this state.”

It is a crowd-pleasing speech. The audience applauds her. A few minutes later, in another explosion of flash bulbs she heads through the crowd and across the pavement to a idling state-owned, black SUV — not a Hummer, but almost as big. One more wave and she is gone.

Will she, or won’t she? How much ambition does her husband have? No matter how private she might want to be in the glare of the public eye she has inhabited all her life, there’s only one way that Arnold is going to get a chance at the presidency. That road runs through Maria. Back when she met him at a charity tennis match, he was a buff weightlifter and she was a pudgy twentysomething. Over the years, he helped her transform herself into a slender and accomplished woman. Now she has repaid the favor by transforming him and his political fortunes. But is that enough for this pair? Would Sen. Schwarzenegger be enough?

True power isn’t about money, or powerful friends, or the stock market. True power is about being able to get people to change, one person at a time. Maria Shriver has proven she can do that. Her re-creation of her husband as a friend of women, centrist and crusader for the earth was a masterful set of moves. What she does with that gift will determine the mark she leaves on this world. As the niece of JFK, it’s hard to imagine that she would run away from the chance to use all this power, no matter how much she doth protest her disinterest in electoral politics.

As her perfume lingers on the air, the jazz band strikes up again and the dancers twirl. If you close your eyes, it could be the Roaring Twenties. Or maybe, just maybe, it is the dawning of a New Millennium and the coming of California’s Camelot.

More Prospering Women Features

• The Prosper List: 22 Powerful Women
• Joan Didion on Nancy Reagan
• Maria's Life: A Timeline
• Maria's Museum: Anatomy of a Takeover
• Erica Jong on Hillary Clinton 

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