George W. Bush Interview With Mark K. Updegrove (Audio) 
Cast Away
During her 23-year marriage to a brother of the president of the United States, Sharon Bush dutifully played the role of stay-at-home mother while reaping the rewards of her famous last name. Only now does she understand the terms of inclusion in the world's most powerful family: Membership can be revoked at any time
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Even with two decades of subliminal instruction in the ways of the Bushes, Sharon, in her fight, was up against the entrenched loyalties and vast reach of a dynasty. The Bushes didn't have to do much to battle their daughter-in-law; people simply divined their disapproval and acted accordingly. Sharon couldn't find a divorce lawyer, for example, because no one wanted to go up against her in-laws. Even the attorney she settled on for several months—Sharon has had four so far—displayed divided loyalties: While taking Neil's deposition, Marshall Davis Brown declared that he hoped Jeb Bush would follow George W. Bush into the presidency. ("I don't really have an opinion on that, honestly," Neil replied. "Yeah, well, I do," Brown countered. "And I hope he does.")
Sharon knew it wasn't enough to fight the family in the courts; she also went to the press, launching a slash-and-burn campaign Karl Rove might have envied. The New York Post, with its numerous and widely read gossip columns, was the plant of choice, especially the sympathetic (and syndicated) Cindy Adams. "I have long known the details [of Neil Bush's affair]," Adams wrote modestly, "but good looking blonde Sharon, whom I've always known to be a devoted mom—having seen her often with her children—asked I not print them." The New York Observer printed a story that Sharon was shopping a book proposal around Manhattan and was lunching with celebrity slasher Kitty Kelley, who was working on a Bush family biography.
As spring turned to summer, Sharon gave a scoop to Houston's KHOU-TV, confessing her private devastation. "I lived those family values," she said. (She had taken a page from the Bush playbook: Pick one issue and stick to it. Sharon's was "family values," a phrase she repeated at every turn.) The segment also contained a clip from Neil's divorce deposition, in which he admitted that he had accepted, while working in Asia, the services of prostitutes sent to his hotel rooms. The most infamous exchange from that interrogation: "Mr. Bush, you have to admit that it's—it's a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her." Neil's admission: "It was very unusual." (Friends of Neil's would later spin this response brilliantly, asserting that his truthful answer underscored his honesty and integrity. They also praised Neil for not sleeping with Maria until her divorce was final.)
Until then, the Bush family maintained its usual above-the-fray silence. Neil and Pierce talked to Diane Sawyer and Connie Chung about Ignite, but the divorce was not mentioned. The shift in position occurred later in July, with a Chronicle story titled "He Said: I Want Out; She Said: I Want More." In this article an entire cast of surrogates emerged to promote Neil's side—not unlike the administration's war against Paul O'Neill and Richard Clarke. The Bushes had an engaging, accomplished ally in Rex John (who didn't speak for attribution until he had clearance from the elder Bushes) and attorneys John and Laura Spalding, close friends of the Andrewses. It was this triumvirate that painted Sharon not as a dedicated suburban mom but as a mad housewife: They explained that she had tried to hold the Bush family up for $20 million (she did, when she believed Ignite's press releases claiming the company was worth $40 million), that she was practicing voodoo to get Neil to come home (debatable: Sharon said she was trying to get a hair sample for a drug test), that she broke into Neil's apartment (admitted), and that she had called Maria a "Mexican whore" on more than one occasion (admitted, begrudgingly).
But while Sharon was publicly attacking her husband and his family, privately she was contacting them for help. Before things got totally out of hand, she wrote to the president and Laura Bush: "I believe in the family values that you both, Jeb and Columba, Bar and Gampy preached to the masses. I do not believe that children should grow up in a divorced home. I have led a straight laced life and been a devoted wife and mother. Now I reach out to you to support me and my children as I am scheduled to go to trial in April. . . . Never in my wildest dreams, after 22 years of marriage, would I have believed that I had to fight for my dignity and financial stability." To Jeb she wrote, "I remember how you appreciated the help I gave you with Columba when you had some very rough times in your marriage. I remember your thankfulness and appreciation towards me when I took the time to spend with Columba in Maine—getting her out of the bedroom—taking her on walks and even getting her into the swimming pool when she was embarrassed about the jewelry incident at customs. I love Columba and was happy to do that for my sister and brother in law of 22 years. I have to tell you how disappointed I am in you and your family." Sharon got no response.
As time went on and Sharon acquiesced to the reality of the divorce, her concern turned to the Houston house she'd shared with Neil since 1993. Sharon wanted to stay in it for another few years, until Ashley finished high school; Neil wanted to sell it immediately to split the proceeds, estimated at around $850,000, and pay the soaring legal bills. Sharon suggested a deal in which the senior Bushes could pay off the existing mortgage balance and take title to the house, but she would lease it back for four more years. At the end of that time, the house would be sold, and the profit—about $500,000—split between Sharon and the Bushes. "This arrangement would provide you with a far greater return than the extant 25% would net Neil, if sold today at distressed market prices," Sharon wrote.
George declined: "First, I could not enter into any deal with which Neil did not agree. . . . Second, I would worry about how the current house would be maintained. As you well know, it is not cheap to properly pay the costs associated with a large house. . . . I think the offer made by me and Jamal should enable you to find a very nice place. Several people I know have bought 3-4 bedroom houses at a cost of less than $300,000." He suggested that Sharon "Move forward, forget the past with Neil, give the kids, in the future, as you have in the past, all the love you can muster." He added, "Barbara and I will always be there for them should some special need arise."
As it turned out, Sharon found the $850,000 needed to pay for the house (the sources remain a mystery). On the day she closed, however, she received a startling piece of news: Robert Andrews was suing her for slander on behalf of his two-year-old. For . . . $850,000.
Robert told friends that he was suing Sharon on principle. She had clouded his son's name by declaring publicly that Neil, not Robert, was his father. Sharon had tried, after the divorce was final, to push for a paternity test and reopen the case, but the judge had denied her request. Now Robert was forcing the issue. Neil told Sharon that if she would publicly apologize, the case would go away. She refused, so Robert pressed on. "That's the kind of stuff that is never going to go away unless you nip it in the bud," Robert's lawyer, Dale Jefferson, insisted. "The Bushes are the closest thing to royalty we have in this country." ("People have their noses so far up the Bushes' tushes it's pathetic," Sharon's current attorney, David Berg, countered.)
As Maria's attorney, Laura Spalding, suggested to me, it isn't in Sharon's emotional interest to settle the slander suit. The case, in which paternity will be established, gives Sharon the legal right to answers to personal questions that have plagued her for some time. If Neil is determined not to be the father, Sharon will know the affair with Maria did not last as long as she had feared. If, on the other hand, Neil is proven to be the father of the boy, Sharon's suspicions—and her fury—will be validated.
It will be a tough case, in which Sharon's attorney, the famously combative Berg, will assert that Robert, not Sharon, made an issue of his son's paternity by calling a press conference to announce the suit. To avoid the expense and the agony of a slander suit, Robert's attorney recently offered to bypass the courts in favor of an old-fashioned wager: Each party would bet $850,000 that the paternity test would come out his or her way. Berg declined on Sharon's behalf. No doubt he figured that the canny Robert would never have sued without establishing paternity first.
"WHY WOULD ANYONE CARE ABOUT me when they can better themselves by being close to the Bushes?" Sharon asked me, displaying a pragmatism honed by two decades of being Bush-worthy. Indeed, many society types had abandoned her—there were a few final Mediterranean and Manhattan freebies before it was all over—and she was finding what solace she could at Lakewood Church, the evangelical behemoth ministered at by another prominent family, the Osteens. They pray for Sharon routinely and save her a parking place in front of the sprawling North Houston sanctuary.
Meanwhile, on March 6, Neil Bush and Maria Andrews married at Jamal Daniel's estate. It wasn't a perfect day: Neither Jeb nor George W. Bush could make it, and Lauren didn't come in from Princeton. But the Dom Perignon flowed and the string quartet played for the 150 or so guests, and the tables were set with the finest linens and the freshest arrangements of roses, hydrangeas, and tulips. There were so many out-of-town guests—from the Middle East, Hong Kong, Mexico—snapping photos of themselves with various Bushes that the official photographer had trouble getting good shots; there were lavish gifts for the newlyweds—a pair of Bulgari watches, a Porsche SUV. Neil toasted his bride and admitted to being "crazy in love." Maria wore the wedding ring Barbara gave her and listened adoringly as the forty-first president of the United States declared, "We love Maria. This is a very happy day in the life of the Bush family."
Then the circle closed around her and the blissful man she had married.
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