5. Taking his shot

It's a sunny Halloween afternoon in Ames, Iowa, where former pro-basketball player and U.S. senator Bill Bradley is scheduled to make his fourth campaign stop of the day. The candidate's plane has arrived about ten minutes ahead of the press plane, so that by the time we disembark, Bradley has-positioned himself in front of the tiny Ames airport, his H six-foot-five-inch frame sprawled across a green plastic chair, ubiquitous grape soda on the ground beside him. His head is thrown back, his eyes are closed; the candidate is catching some rays. As we hit the tarmac, he looks up. "Welcome to Ames," he says, deadpan, giving us a wave before he closes his eyes again. Finally, after everybody else is loaded in the vans, ready for a walking tour of a couple of Ames blocks, he climbs in. "I got him up," says his "body man" Matt Henshon, "by telling him he would still be out in the sun."

"Senator Offbeat"—that's what the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater called him. Cool, seemingly laconic, Bradley's doing his own thing out there on the campaign trail, coming off as refreshingly straightforward or just a little weird, depending on whom you're talking to. Earlier that day, he'd told CBS's Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation that he "drew the line" where religion was concerned; it just wasn't something he was going to talk about. Schieffer was left to ask him simply whether or not he believed in God. "Yes." "Can you tell us any more about it than that?" "No."

Later, when he arrives at the house of a supporter, 60 people are gathered in the backyard, but first the host, a nice man named Jay, asks Bradley if he'd like some cider or a soft drink, or maybe even some beer before he addresses the crowd. Bradley looks at him. "You got any whiskey?" This is the point at which Matt steps in to reassure us all that the senator was making a joke, but Bradley's not quite finished. Standing on the man's backyard deck, he notices that part of the lawn has been roped off. "You know,-when I got here today, Jay promised me that each and every one of you would vote for me." Pause. "I'm only kidding. The only commitment Jay made today is that he would save his best grass."

Normal flesh-pressing it ain't. It is, rather, an approach that sometimes gets him labeled diffident, aloof, anti-charismatic. But it seems to be working. When Bradley threw his hat in the ring a year ago, most pundits—and supporters of Vice President Al Gore—dismissed the announcement as the insignificant and self-indulgent act of a once-oversung hero of the Democratic Party. He had, after all, waffled when he'd had better shots, in 1988 and 1992. Now he seemed to be setting himself up as the automatically unsuccessful and tedious spoiler in a race in which all the other possible contenders had had the good sense to realize they could never make it against the well-financed sitting vice president.

That, of course, was before he raised as much money as the vice president and began leading him not just in New Hampshire but in New York; before he put Gore on the defensive, prompting him to change everything from his clothes to the address of his headquarters. That was before respected political journalists like the Washington Post's David Broder began writing columns with headlines like script for an upset, and the Gore campaign team's disarray was repeatedly – almost luridly – displayed on the front page of The New York Times. His endorsements include those from Senators Bob Kerrey and Daniel-Patrick: Moynihan, Wall Street heavy hitters Lou Susman, managing director of Salomon Smith Barney, and Thomas Labrecque, retired chairman of Chase-Manhattan' Bank, and Lakers-coach and former Knicks teammate Phil Jackson. (“Why did he take the job with the Los Angeles Lakers? It was not-because he thinks the Lakers can be champions – it is because it’s apart of my Southern California strategy. Make no mistake about that."- Barry Diller gave him a fund-raiser in L.A.; fans as disparate as designer Tommy Hilfiger and investment tycoon Herbert Alien round up checks for him in New York. He is running a big-league campaign in every way—except stylistically. So the question now is, Will the style sell?

Bradley doesn't just want to be president; he says he wants to change the way presidential campaigns are waged. In the beginning, he conducted what amounted to a floating seminar – introducing himself to small -groups of voters: probing, pushing, _finding out what their daily - concerns were, begging for their "stories." He was, he said, putting together a "narrative," a word not often the mainstay of a stump speech. Meanwhile," he steered clear of what he cafe "contrived" settings and exchanges. In a race in which we know, for example, that George W. Bush reads the Bible every day, Bradley will not discuss religion. In a race in which we knew that Mr. Popper's Penguins was Al Gore's favorite childhood book, Bradley has-declined to "go down the road" of the favorite book. ("What if I said Crime and Punishment! People might say I identified with a killer;") After Bush flunked a reporter's pop quiz on foreign leaders, the same reporter sprang a similar quiz on Bradley, and he simply refused to play.

It is something he does often. At the first Democratic town meeting in Concord, New Hampshire, Gore's staff distributed five press releases in 38 minutes, correcting Bradley, touting Gore. Bradley barely bothered to dispute Gore's estimate of what Bradley's own health-care package would cost. After Bradley's performance that night, Bob Woodward said he communicated a "presidential, almost Olympian calm." But Bradley is a bred competitor (former Boston Celtic John Havlicek says he still has his old opponent's handprints on his backside); it is more than calm he's demonstrating—it's an act of will. "It requires some discipline, yes," Bradley tells me one afternoon in Davenport, Iowa, scraping soup out of a plastic container. "You always can resort to the elbows, but you make a judgment about what the politics of our time needs and what you can offer. You wanna win, but you wanna win in a certain way."

He is, he says in almost every speech, trying to "respect people" by running a "positive campaign." That he is trying to save his "outrage for those things that I want to change," and his ‘ingenuity to try and figure out, how do we get everybody to see that we’ve got to head in the same direction?’’Vogue,12.1999.

6. A charmed circle

I’m in the wig room. For those of you who don’t have one, it is a small room where footmen powdered your, or more likely your husband's, wig. The house was built in 1588", so there are many such nooks and crannies, just perfect for me, the spy. So many young mothers are spies. They have to be, watching their child covertly, for clues, for signals, for some way to comprehend what is going on in that secret new bundle of nerve ends, tender flesh, brains, and biology that we almost inadvertently create over a long nine months.

I’m in the wig room, putting away linen. It might be a charming image – a young matron, keys at her waist – but in fact I'm in a froth of rage about the whole business of being a mother. What I want back is what I was, as archetypal mother/writer Sylvia Plath put it, “before the bed, before the knife, before the brooch and the salve fixed me in this parenthesis.”

I have three babies at this time, and I love them. At first they were adorable, noisy blobs; now, somehow, worryingly, they are fast growing into people with wills of steel, and there are times – and this is one of them – when I want not to be a mother ever again. For a start, I didn’t realize that they were going to be there forever. I thought in my innocence that you could, as it were, dip into babies, and I remember once at the very beginning driving into Bath and realizing as I parked that I had a tiny baby and she was sleeping in an empty house some 20 miles away. I had work to do. Writing. And she wouldn't let me.

The wig room is off the nursery, which has a big old window seat, like in Jane Eyre, and Rose and Daisy, two of my three daughters, are sitting there. I know this not because I have seen them, but because they have come in together, talking, intimate, and something about their tone, the urgency of their words, has made me freeze. Rose is six; Daisy is five. I know in my mind's eye how they look on the seat, blonde heads soldered together, their earnest, beautiful faces turned to each other, two philosophers with fat little lips.

I am famished by love of my daughters. How did this happen? Motherhood had always been an uninviting prospect to me. I'd had enough of the receiving end. The word mother carried a message I didn't want to hear-or repeat. Trammeled lives, little cruelties, a turntable of defeating busyness, and no joy in sight. I watched my own mother to make sure I would not become like her, though I was sure there was a dark angel ahead waiting to drop her image over me like a second skin turning me into the Mother. It seemed to me there was no way of escaping the destiny of repetition. So, easy answer, I would not become one.

And yet here I was, a mother of three stacking up fine linen and feeling a wedge being driven into my heart so that I could almost feel it creaking apart. I didn't know at the time that these wedges are necessary to widen the heart up, since it has either to widen or to break. I was in a rage because I wanted to have my life of such a short time before back, back to when I was a free woman, an adventurous spirit, an editor at Vogue and a protegee of Diana Vreeland – back when a heart was a Chanel motif, to be worn on the sleeve, a bauble outlined in diamonds.

I first met Vreeland in 1964, when I was nineteen and working as features editor at Vogue in London. The offices were open-plan, with partitions and bookcases at shoulder height, and so I first saw her as this extraordinary apparition, gliding along above the level of the filing cabinets. Then she swung round the corner between the cabinets and stood there burnished and shining in front of me like an Aztec goddess, with that unique stance that Cecil Beaton has famously described: “the Vreeland medieval slouch, pelvis thrust forward to an astonishing degree and the torso above it sloping backwards at a 45-degree angle.” Enormous stretched red canyon of a mouth; high, red cheeks; black-on-black lacquered hair; edge and cut and glitter; slanting eyes that missed nothing, nothing to do with the body, and as I came to know, missed many a thing to do with the soul. She came to a standstill in front of me, her retinue behind juddering to a stop. Her eyes swooped about, editing what she was seeing into what she wanted it to look like. I sat transfixed.

I'd joined Vogue only a short time before, and my first article, about the playwright John Osborne, had just been published. His seminal play, Look Back in Anger, had changed British theater at one blow. He'd become an icon, worshiped and loathed in equal measure. So when I wrote to ask for an interview, I didn't have much hope that he'd give one. It never occurred that I could actually have access to one of my great heroes. I'd as soon see Shelley plain or say hello to-Balzac. But I got a sweet note back suggesting we meet for lunch; we talked all afternoon. And then, ten a cable came into the office that I have still pinned to my heart. It simply said, “Osborne/Devlin text superb.$500 for first American rights. D.V.” In my lingo, D. V. meant Deo volonte, “God willing.” Something we were taught in convent school always to use when speaking or writing of the future, presumably to preempt presumption. That first, enabling cable was from Diana Vreeland, and I loved her for it.

My stock rose within the London office, since American Vogue rarely lifted pieces from other magazines in the Conde Nast family. I was puffed up with pride, but the pride was as nothing compared with the prospect of $500 for those mysterious first American rights. Five hundred dollars then was the equivalent of six months’ salary, but it was much more than that to me. It was a recognition that could write, that my writing was worth something, that people would pay to read it. And now here was the reality of “God willing” in front of me, talking nineteen the dozen and offering me a job at American Vogue.

I'd read Vogue avidly since I was a young girl in a remote part of Ireland, 1eading such an atavistic life that turning those glossy pages was like accessing an archive from the future.

The past hung around Ireland like a shroud, and Vogue was gleaming and shining and soaring. The world of Vogue was so brightly lit - everything was illuminated, the shine on a string of pearls, the gleam on the curve of a cheek, the sheen on a satin ball dress. At home, shine was the sun on the lake, the reflection of brass harness on a horse's neck, the gleam of leaves in the chestnut tree. In Vogue, there were articles on cars as fashion accessories. At home, there were only two cars in the district, the priest's jalopy and ours. The world of Vogue sparkled night and day—flashlights, footlights, headlights. At home at night, the silence was palpable, the darkness profound.

The world of Vogue under Diana Vreeland, as I came to know it, was all invention, eclecticism, and style. The world I had come from knew nothing of invention; everything was old, organic, decaying—a place I think she'd have been amazed to know still existed, a culture on the brink of extinction, the ragged ends of a dispensation that had lasted for centuries. The world of the horse and cart, of silence and lapping water, dark colors that didn't show the dirt, religion and madness. Trapped in this Irish world, I had entered the Vogue talent contest and won it, which was how I had landed on the staff a year later.