Sitting Pretty
She is the perfect image of a United States senator—until she loses her cool. Then you see the real Kay Bailey Hutchison, the one who says, “I’ve had to fight for everything I get.”
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Her parents expected that, unlike many of her classmates, Kay would graduate from college and become as successful as her father was in the business world — and as successful as her mother was at home. From the beginning, her ambition was at war with her image of femininity. Resolving the two has been her lifelong task.
Even as a child, Kay was her own toughest critic. Her best friends were two girls, Nancy and Cornelia, who lived down the street. The trio were inseparable. They played with Barbie dolls, went swimming in the summer, and had frequent sleepovers. “The other two girls were precious, absolutely gorgeous,” said Kay. “Compared to them I was really plain, and that was the beginning of my striving to get attention.” That feeling that somehow being second best was enough to stimulate a competitive drive that never lagged. “Take ballet,” Hutchison explained. “I took ballet lessons for twelve years — from kindergarten all the way through high school. I took it twice a week, even though I had no natural talent for it whatsoever. I just wouldn’t give up. Sometimes I even ask myself, ‘Why didn’t I quit?’”
The reason she didn’t quit is that she gives herself no quarter. If you quit, you are imperfect, and for Hutchison, imperfection is intolerable. To the outside world, success seemed to come easily to her. She was a cheerleader for three years in high school, prom queen, and Miss La Marque High School her senior year. With her white bobby socks and her hair in a ponytail, the slim and athletic Kay was the kind of all-American girl who could have been on TV in the Mickey Mouse Club.
“Kay was by far the most popular girl in school,” said Carol Ottwork Hasserd, a childhood friend who still lives in La Marque. “She won every award in town by a landslide, and most of those awards were by popular vote. No one gave them to her.”
She graduated in the top 10 percent of her high school class and went off to the University of Texas, where she pledged the most exclusive sorority on campus, Pi Beta Phi, and became a cheerleader. Yet her ambition remained unsatisfied. “I was on the marriage track,” said Hutchison. “I thought I would be a housewife and a mother. The point was, I didn’t really think of a career. I decided to go to law school because I hadn’t found a husband by my junior year.”
She entered UT law school her senior year in college, one of only ten women in a class of five hundred. She was six hours shy of a college diploma—three hours of French and three of chemistry, requirements that she finally finished about the time the uproar started over railroad commissioner Lena Guerrero’s phony academic credentials in 1992.
After law school, she married a Houston physician, but the marriage lasted only a few months, a failure that must have been devastating to someone whose main ambition was still to be a wife and mother. She won’t talk about the divorce. Instead, she dwells on what happened in her professional life — her inability to get a job as a lawyer in Houston in 1967 — as the first turning point in her adult life. It was the first time, but not the last, that she consciously viewed herself as a victim. When Hutchison said today that she was indicted because of a Democratic conspiracy or that her employees resented her because she was a woman boss, the root of that anger is when she couldn’t get a job as a lawyer.
“Most of the firms just said no and didn’t offer a reason,” Hutchison told me. “Others said that most of their clients were male and wouldn’t like working with women lawyers. A few said they wouldn’t make the investment in me because they thought I’d get married and quit.”
One day in 1968 she was driving around Houston, feeling frustrated about not having a job, when she saw KPRC-TV offices and decided on the spur of the moment to apply. The station hired her as a reporter. This was the second turning point in her life: She became a public figure and gained a familiarity with politics. Equally important, she had obeyed her instinct about what she wanted and had succeeded. She had acquired a reputation for assertiveness around the station — someone who could gather facts quickly and was good on camera, but she refused to carry camera equipment and turned up her nose at crime stories. She developed a niche as a political reporter and opened the station’s Austin bureau, where she covered a session of the Texas Legislature.
In 1970 she went to work in politics as press secretary to Republican National Committee co-chair Anne Armstrong. Two years later, she ran for the Legislature from Houston and won. She was 29. When I asked her about the race, one of her memories was of encountering the same double standard that she had learned to resent while job hunting as a law school graduate. “At the beginning, women couldn’t get big checks from contributors,” she told me. “So I just worked hard getting lots of small checks, most of them from other women.”
Her record in the Legislature was much like it is now: following the Republican line (she voted against declaring Martin Luther King’s birthday a state holiday) but evidencing a strong interest in gender issues (she authored a bill giving more protection to rape victims during court proceedings). The star of the small group of Republican legislators was Ray Hutchison. Ray was also a freshman, but he was ten years older, politically wiser, and more inclined to engage in debate.
At the time, Ray was married with three children and living in Dallas. Four years later, after he was divorced and Kay had moved to Washington to chair the National Transportation Board, their romance began. They married in March 1978, and Kay found herself trying to balance marriage with her career. She came home to Texas to help Ray run for governor in the GOP primary, but her own drive pushed her on. During interviews, she sounded more like the candidate than the wife. She called for the establishment of a state energy office, and she made headlines in Houston when a campaign coordinator accused her of meddling in campaign strategy. When Ray lost to Bill Clements, Kay went to work in the private sector for RepublicBank, a seat of financial power in Dallas. Later she bought a candy company and added female entrepreneur to her résumé.
In 1982 she ran for Congress in Dallas for a seat vacated by Jim Collins. During the primary campaign, she complained that supporters of Steve Bartlett (now the mayor of Dallas) were running a smear campaign against her. Hutchison led Bartlett going into the runoff, but an anonymous letter containing personal slurs against Kay was mailed to her supporters. She lost the election, and on election night she was so overwrought that she burst into tears during her concession speech. It’s the only time in her career that she has cried in public. Twelve years later, it’s the letter — not the tears — that she remembers about that campaign. “I’ve learned how to fight back since then,” said Hutchison defiantly. “When someone hits you with mud, you have to wash off immediately. If I had it to do over again, I’d make that letter public.”
Once again Hutchison saw herself as a victim. The attacks had come from the Republican right wing, just as they do now, and for the same reasons—her moderate stand on abortion and her status as a career woman without children. The subject of children has always been well within her carefully protected zone of privacy, but when I asked her about whether she had made a conscious decision not to have a family, she and Ray acknowledged that until a few months before she announced for the U.S. Senate, they had tried—without success—to have children.
“I really wanted kids,” Kay said late one evening in Washington after a fourteen-hour workday. There was a look of unmasked pain on her face, and her voice dropped to barely a whisper. The specter of failure was plain to see. It was by far the most vulnerable I had seen her. Her inability to have children has become yet another reason to drive herself, a void she fills by working herself even harder. “When people tell me how easy my life has been and how I’ve had everything handed to me, I just shake my head,” sighed Hutchison. “An easy life it has not been.”
In Washington Kay Hutchison has cast herself in the role of victim and used it to her advantage. The indictment and trial haven’t hurt her stature. “The way most of us viewed what happened to Kay,” said Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, a GOP colleague, “is that the democrats couldn’t beat her at the polls so they trumped up these politically motivated charges.” Coats said he felt so sorry for her that he offered privately to vote for funding for the space station, a vote important to Texas and therefore to Hutchison, even though he personally opposed it.
Whether Texas voters will be equally forgiving remains to be seen. The criminal case was so poorly prosecuted that the legal issues are unlikely to come up in the campaign. Richard Fisher, her Democratic opponent, has said publicly that he does not intend to raise the matter. On the other hand, there is no way to know how badly Hutchison has been tarnished by the personal revelations.
She has certainly suffered personally. She wears the pain of her indictment like a pin that’s a tad gaudy. “I did not sleep for months,” Hutchison told me. “I’ve taken a lot of unnecessary harassment in my career, but this by far was the worst.” She seems more serious now, more like a mature woman than the girl next door. When she told me, “If Fisher uses the phrase ‘indicted felon’ in any of his TV ads, I’ll bury him,” I had the sense that I was seeing the real Kay Hutchison, one who has finally resolved the war between her image and her ambition in favor of the latter. With the trail behind her and her imperfections revealed to the public, she finally feels confident enough to fight out in the open. At 51, she’s old enough to harness her formidable drive and give up the burden of having to be pretty. “I wouldn’t be where I am if I hadn’t gone the extra mile,” said Hutchison, in a voice that ran true. “At least I know now that nothing is ever going to be as excruciating as what I’ve been through already. If I lose an election, I can take it. Whatever happens, I’ve proven I can stand it.”
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