. . . And His Lovely Wife (19 page)

A year before, Joanna had been so timid that she wouldn't have uttered a peep if a two-hundred-pound man had stood on her foot for a six-mile ride on the subway, but the campaign—and her loyalty to Sherrod—seemed to coax out Joanna the She-Warrior. She did her best to thwart the trackers, jumping in front of their cameras, taking their photos as they photographed her, and basically just making them as miserable as possible without committing a felony.

Even so, they managed to maneuver around Joanna's bobbing head enough to catch snippets of Sherrod on tape, and now there he was, starring in an ad meant to humiliate him, courtesy of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

He looked great in the footage if you could ignore the constant incantation, “Sherrod Brown let us down…Sherrod Brown let us down.” Which I couldn't. A colleague from
The Plain Dealer
had gushed after seeing the ad the day before, playing silently on one of the mounted TV screens in the newsroom. “Hey, Sherrod looked really hot in the latest ad,” she wrote in an e-mail, not knowing that she was describing a Republican attack ad.

“You might want to turn up the volume next time,” I wrote back. Later that afternoon she responded with a single line: “I hate them I hate them I hate them…”

As soon as Sherrod and I sat down in the waiting room, another attack ad came on the TV. This time, it was from Sherrod's opponent, Mike DeWine. In it he was perched on a porch railing wearing a plaid shirt and talking in the folksiest of newfound twangs about O
-hiiii-
a and the “terrists” threatening us all.

“I don't believe this,” I said, pointing at the screen. Sherrod, a little preoccupied with thoughts of the slice-and-dice awaiting him down the hall, just laughed.

An elderly woman sitting to our right glanced over at us, motioned toward the screen, frowned, and gave it an ardent thumbs-down.

Right after this gesture of solidarity, a woman in her fifties came out and asked Sherrod to join her for a brief intake interview. She was a polite woman who, we soon learned, had worked at the hospital for nearly thirty years. She looked at the computer screen and did a double take when she read Sherrod's supposed date of birth.

“You were born in 1962?”

Sherrod's face lit up like the butt of a firefly. Oh-ho-ho, no, he wasn't born in 1962, he was actually born in nineteen
fifty-
two, but, hey, if she wanted to make him ten years younger…

On and on he went, which was the first indication that he was actually nervous. A five-minute interview turned into a fifteen-minute chatfest as Sherrod talked to her about her kids, where she grew up, how long she'd been working there—oh, and what did she think of his doctor? When he finally walked out of her office, she all but hugged him.

Almost immediately, Sherrod was called back to get undressed. While I waited for permission to kiss him good-bye, the Republican attack ad ran again, followed by DeWine's. Again.

The TV was set to WOIO–Channel 19, the station that made national headlines in 2004 after one of its news anchors stripped on the air for ratings during sweeps week. I had criticized Channel 19's tactics in the past in my column, and I condemned her stunt, too. An anchorperson at the station told me that since then, everyone at Channel 19 was under a standing order never to talk to me.

Sherrod's campaign had purchased nearly a half-million dollars' worth of airtime the day before to run his response ad, but it never popped up on the screen of Channel 19 that morning. Our campaign manager, John Ryan, had mentioned that one station had refused to run our ad until Saturday. By the fifth Mike DeWine ad, I had a hunch I'd found the station.

It was right about then, though, that the friendly receptionist shuffled over to me and delivered me from my suffering.

“Do you mind if I change the channel?” she said.

I grabbed her hand. “I hate this,” I hissed, a little too loudly. That sixty-something lady with the curved back and sensible shoes suddenly high-fived me with the force of a trucker chugging an energy drink.

“Let's just get rid of those ads, shall we?” the receptionist said. She switched to CNN, and I still can't believe how relieved I was to see so many ads for Anderson Cooper.

As for the surgery, Sherrod was wheels up, as surgeons love to say, by 7:13
A.M.
Surgery went extremely well, as indicated by the full-color photos of his repaired hernias that the doctor handed to me when he came to deliver the news at 8:15
A.M.

Yes, photos. Why do doctors do that?

After reviving me and lifting me back into my chair, the good doctor assured me that Sherrod would be ready to leave in no time and that I could come back to see him in just a little bit. When I asked if Sherrod was awake yet, Dr. Onders smiled and said, “Oh, he's been awake for some time now. Talking to everybody in sight, too.”

About fifteen minutes later, Dr. Onders came to get me, and as soon as I walked into Sherrod's room he introduced me to the attending nurse, Jennifer, a cheerful mother of two from a city east of Cleveland who had already told Sherrod she might be moving.

“Tell her why,” said Sherrod, who was sucking on an ice chip.

“Because all the senior citizens voted down the school levy and now my kids have no bus.”

“No bus,” Sherrod said, closing his eyes.

“He's so nice,” she said, pointing to Sherrod, who quickly opened his eyes and strained his head to see the guy being wheeled into the room next to his. “And he's interested in
everything.
”

I pushed Sherrod's head down onto the pillow, worried that his curiosity would roll him right out of bed and onto the floor. “Why don't you rest a bit, honey.”

By 10
A.M.
Sherrod was allowed to go home. I helped him dress, and as I pulled on his shoes he starting rambling like any man who's just had abdominal surgery: “You know, after our ads go up there's a good chance that some people who've given maybe one hundred or two hundred dollars might be willing to give more, and you have to figure that the
USA Today
poll numbers that just came out are really going to help with…”

I went to get the car.

As I walked out the side door from the outpatient clinic at University Hospitals, I couldn't help but notice there was a policeman standing there, and he knew my name.

“Ms. Schultz,” he said, nodding his head.

I didn't find out until later that Joanna, ever mindful of trackers, had called the hospital to make sure Sherrod wasn't videotaped as he hobbled toward the car.

I pulled up to the cashier's window in the parking garage and handed her a stamped business card from the hospital's CEO. One of his assistants had given it to me after stopping by the waiting room to see if I needed anything while Sherrod was in surgery. He was just doing his job, but I couldn't help but think it's always the people who least need the perks who get them.

On my way out of the parking garage, I glanced at the booth on my right and recognized the woman who had insisted I fill out a due bill to pay for parking my car, minutes after my father had died. I had had a ten-dollar bill for a four-dollar fee. She said she couldn't make change. It was four in the morning.

I remembered her response when, at the end of my wits, I teared up and told her my father had just died and all I wanted to do was go home.

“That's not my problem, is it?” she had said. “You aren't going anywhere until I fill out this ticket.” So I sat in my car and waited for her to record my license plate number and the make of my car.

This time, with no money at all, the congressman's wife just handed the card to the cashier and was on her way.

When I pulled up in the car, Sherrod was waiting to introduce me to the orderly who had just wheeled him to the curb.

“This is Mr. Shelton,” he said. “His wife has a job similar to his at the Cleveland Clinic, but he's working three jobs so that she can go to college and become a nurse.”

Mr. Shelton beamed.

“I've always voted for you,” he yelled as we pulled away. “And I'm gonna vote for you again!”

By the time we got home, the campaign staff had sent an e-mail with a new TV ad that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had produced with their own footage of Sherrod captured on the campaign trail. Federal elections law now prevented us from knowing what, if anything, the DSCC was planning to do to promote Sherrod's race, and so both of us saw the ad for the first time when I opened my laptop and sat next to him on the bed.

Images of Sherrod the Regular Guy (denim shirt, wild curly hair) and Sherrod the Statesman (blue shirt, rep tie, and barely any hair at all) flashed across the screen as folksy guitar music played. Clips of Sherrod in action were augmented by a deep male voice declaring Sherrod a champion of the middle class. Then the faceless voice heralded Sherrod's decision not to take the congressional health care plan.

“And he never will,” the man intoned, “until all Americans have health care.”

seventeen

Wifely Duties

I
T WAS THE USUAL
M
ONDAY MORNING CONFERENCE CALL WITH
senior staff and consultants, but it was far from the usual conversation.

“We're going to have to do an ad with Sherrod's ex-wife,” one of the Triplets said. “We've got to be ready for an attack.”

Eight other people were on the call, but nobody said a word.

Oh great,
I thought.
Everyone's waiting to see how
this
wife is going to handle the news.

From the moment Sherrod decided to run, a part of me had known this day—or at least this conversation—would come. We knew that the Republicans, under Karl Rove's reign, had already logged a long and successful track record of dirty campaigns. We also knew after DeWine's first attack ad that Rove was involved in Sherrod's race here in Ohio, the much ballyhooed “bellwether” state. Just as important, we were certain from our own opposition research on Sherrod that, aside from his divorce, there was little personal dirt to dig up on him. As one of my
Plain Dealer
colleagues, politics writer Steve Koff, once jokingly complained, Sherrod didn't even have credit card debt to expose.

“Does he really not have any debt?” Koff asked in a call to my desk in the newsroom before I took my leave.

“We have a mortgage and that's it,” I told him. “Sherrod doesn't believe in credit card debt because he doesn't want to pay interest.”

Koff groaned, and laughed at Sherrod's consistency, but the larger point was not lost on him. While Sherrod was extremely generous with others and donated at least 10 percent of his annual income to charity, he lived a frugal personal life that would have given a Franciscan monk a run for his prayer beads. A beagle is higher maintenance than Sherrod.

When I met him in 2003, he still drove a beat-up 1996 Ford Thunderbird assembled at a plant in his congressional district—“Made in Lorain!” he always crowed—that cruised so low to the ground I felt as if I had to pick gravel out of my backside every time I rode in it. As I write this, it still sits in our driveway, plastered with political bumper stickers that date as far back as 1999 and looking so ratty you find yourself looking for the cinder blocks.

It was hard to find much to smear in that lifestyle.

Our campaign strategists were certain, though, that the Republicans would delight in exploiting allegations Sherrod's ex-wife, Larke, had made against him during their 1986 divorce. She had initiated the divorce while he was Ohio's secretary of state.

Cleveland Scene
magazine, an alternative weekly, ran a cover profile of Sherrod in 2001 that included this alarming passage about their ugly divorce:

When Sherrod and Larke Brown split in 1986, it was a well-known secret in political circles that they parted badly. Statehouse reporters at the time were delivered anonymous brown envelopes containing court documents with claims of neglect and cruelty. Larke had sought a restraining order against her husband….

Brown answered that he had never been abusive toward his wife and daughters. A divorce was granted in 1987; the court found both parties at fault.

The allegations had been in the news before. In October 1992, Sherrod, who had suffered his only election defeat in 1990, was running for Congress. In a last-ditch effort to derail his race, his opponent, Margaret Mueller, ran a radio ad with the voice of a woman—voters were supposed to believe it was Larke—reading aloud from the divorce allegations. Larke stepped up for Sherrod and demanded that Mueller pull the ad.

Mueller refused to take the ad off the air, but Sherrod won the race, and it was the last time a political opponent had tried to dredge up the old, and disavowed, allegations. Mike DeWine, though, had a history of smear tactics. In 1992, DeWine ran against Senator John Glenn, who was a decorated war hero and former astronaut. This didn't deter DeWine from accusing Glenn of being unpatriotic and soft on Communism.
The Columbus Dispatch
offered up this quote from the DeWine campaign: “If Glenn had his way the Berlin Wall still would be standing and former Soviet republics still would be enslaved.” DeWine lost the race.

Sherrod regularly mentioned DeWine's race against Glenn during any “what if” discussions about potential attacks. He and most of the campaign's senior staff figured it was only a matter of time before DeWine, aided and abetted by the Republican National Committee, trotted out the divorce allegations to raise doubts about Sherrod's character. Soon after the 2006 primary, the allegations showed up on some conservative bloggers' websites.

Life had changed considerably for Sherrod since his divorce twenty years ago. He was a seven-term congressman, and after sixteen years as a single parent, he was now happily married—to me. He claimed there was a definite connection.

No one celebrated our marriage more than his daughters, Emily and Elizabeth, who were now grown and devoted as ever to him. Their ties to their father ran deep and long. Despite the divorce, he never missed a chance to be with them, which I mistakenly once referred to as his “visitation.” Whoo-boy, did Sherrod erupt.

“I hate that word,” he said. “I didn't
visit
my own children. I am their
father.
I raised them too.”

That was evident the first time I went to Sherrod's home. He lived in a century-old two-story colonial on the shore of Lake Erie in Lorain. The walls and most tabletops were covered with framed photographs of the girls. Every cupboard, shelf, and closet held relics of their childhood: tiny mittens and fuzzy winter caps, homemade magnets from church school, favorite stones retrieved from walks on the rocky beach. Their bedroom was frozen in time, the time when they were little girls who slept head to head in matching twin beds facing framed caricatures of their younger selves.

I smiled the first time I saw that room, imagining them rolling their teenage eyes in amusement, surrounded by memories of their previous selves. Dozens of stuffed animals and dolls still rested in a triangle of net hanging in a corner from the ceiling, and a small white bookcase by the doorway remained full of the blue-and-yellow spines of Nancy Drew mysteries. Hanging on the wall above was a framed newspaper essay Sherrod wrote in 1988 about one of the many train trips he took around the country with his daughters.

Sherrod's most prized possession from the girls' childhood was “The Funny Book,” which was full of his handwritten memories of times when they said something humorous or poignant during their childhood. The only rule: If you tried to be funny, it didn't make the book. Over time, one of Sherrod's favorite bedtime rituals, before he played songs on his guitar, was to read a story or two from the book before they went to sleep.

“Read the wood story,” one of them would say, and Sherrod would turn to the passage recounting the time when he told five-year-old Elizabeth, “You're a piece of work.” Her response: “You're a piece of wood, too, Daddy.”

When twenty-four-year-old Emily married in 2005, Sherrod painstakingly hand-copied into a new journal the entire contents of the Funny Book. At the rehearsal dinner, he promised Elizabeth he would do the same thing for her. He gave it to her for Christmas in 2006.

Another change in Sherrod's life was in his relationship with Larke. After years of tension, they had found their way to something better. Larke and I hit it off from the beginning, unburdened with any mutual history. We celebrated graduations together, attended Emily's wedding reception at their home, and when Sherrod declared his candidacy for the Senate, Larke told the girls she wanted pins and bumper stickers. In March, she and her husband, Joe, held a standing-room-only fundraiser for Sherrod, and Sherrod could not help but laugh when he saw both of them wearing his sticker as they greeted us at the door of their Granville home.

“Did you ever think you'd see this?” he said to his daughters. I don't think Emily and Elizabeth ever stopped smiling that night.

It was a preemptive strike, a chance to let DeWine know we were a united front. Larke and Joe held a second fundraiser in October.

Sherrod dreaded telling his daughters that it looked as though the divorce that had brought so much sadness and pain to their young lives might resurface again. He warned them, and asked them if they thought their mother might be willing to film an ad to defend him. Emily offered to ask her, and within days, Larke agreed to help.

I worried what dredging up the allegations might mean for us, for Emily and Elizabeth, and for Larke and Joe, too. I also worried about the public's turning a wary eye on our marriage. I had a hard time believing that anyone who knew me or read my column would ever believe I'd marry a man capable of abuse. But publicizing such awful allegations, no matter how false, would automatically focus the lens of scrutiny on our marriage, too.

So far, I had been invisible in campaign ads and literature. While I was out stumping almost daily for my husband, his campaign literature didn't even hint at the existence of a wife, lovely or otherwise. Photos of his parents and his daughters appeared in ads, but the consultants never even suggested that I be included in the packaging. I never had the nerve to ask the consultants why they ruled me out as a commercial asset.

Besides, I was torn. As a journalist, the last thing I wanted was to appear in a political ad, even for Sherrod. Some of my friends, however, pointed out with frustration that other candidates—including the Democratic nominee for Ohio governor and also Sherrod's opponent—had ads and literature in which their wives were prominently featured. Granted, they were depicted walking alongside their husbands and glancing at them with a loving gaze, but at least voters knew they existed. DeWine showcased his entire family—they had eight children and nine grandchildren, he always pointed out to reporters—while Sherrod appeared to be the same fancy-free bachelor he'd been for the sixteen years before we met.

Occasionally, I grumbled to Sherrod, who expressed puzzlement over the strategy. But he had other things on his mind. I had said nothing to the consultants, until that morning when they announced during the conference call that they wanted to do an ad with Sherrod's ex-wife and their two daughters, just in case DeWine brought up the old allegations.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We haven't had so much as the toe of my tennies in an ad for Sherrod, but now we're going to film an entire piece with his ex-wife?”

Silence.

“Isn't there a role I should be playing in this? Do we really want the only wifely image in Sherrod's race to be that of his
former
wife?”

More silence, if you didn't count the growl of collective throat clearing.

“We'll write a couple of scripts and run them past you,” Mattis Goldman finally said.

“We won't do anything until you guys sign off on it,” added John Ryan. I knew he'd be calling me as soon as the call was over.

“John,” I said, not even bothering to say hello, after the phone rang.

“We're not going to do anything that makes you uncomfortable,” he said.

“This whole thing makes me uncomfortable.”

“Okay, well, we won't do anything that will make you feel worse than you have to.”

“This is your idea of reassurance?”

John sighed. “I know this hard for you. It's hard for me, too. I've never had to deal with anything like this.”

“That's what you get for having a long, happy marriage.”

After a lot of negotiation and dickering over the next few days, we finally agreed that a “blended family” ad would work best—or it would at least keep Sherrod's current wife from imploding, which is what I suspected was the agreement behind closed doors. The ad would include Larke and Elizabeth and Emily, and me with my daughter, Caitlin. My son, Andy, was traveling out of state and couldn't make it.

The night before the shoot, I sent an e-mail:

Dear Larke,

I can only imagine your thoughts as you bolster yourself for tomorrow's filming. It cannot be easy, no matter how much you love your daughters or believe in the cause for change, and I am grateful for your willingness to do what few others would even consider. You and I have had nothing but wonderful interactions from the day we met, and I love Sherrod so much, that it is hard even to imagine a different time between the two of you. I see both of you as such honorable, kind people, and what you are doing tomorrow for Sherrod and his race confirms all of my assumptions about you as a mother and a fellow traveler in this thing we call life.

Please thank Joe, too, for we know what this asks of him. The two of you show a commitment to something so much larger than yourselves that the mere thought of it takes my breath away.

I think someday we might laugh about all this. Not tomorrow, but someday.

Until then, I just wanted to extend my own gratitude to you. I do look forward to seeing you. And the mischief in me is enjoying the discomfort of the consultants and film crew. They've seen too many bad movies, I'm afraid, and don't quite know what to make of us.

Love,

Connie

W
E FILMED THE AD IN
CLEVELAND ON THE SECOND
S
ATURDAY IN
September. It was scheduled for the afternoon because I had to give two speeches that morning in central Ohio. Immediately after the second talk I hightailed it north over two and a half hours of interstate to a stranger's home to film the ad. The director had spotted the house on a tour of neighborhoods, and one of our staff members asked the owner if we could borrow it for the day. Generously, she agreed.

When I showed up she was immediately friendly, and full of opinions. She took one look at me and said, “Oh. She's going to need makeup.” She delivered this verdict in front of Larke and our daughters and the twenty or so members of the production crew. Caitlin shot me a sympathetic grin.