By the end of last week, Rachael Worby, first lady of West Virginia, was finally keeping quiet. But everybody else in the state, especially the local press, was buzzing about Walsh’s Divided Lives (284 pages. Simon & Schuster. $23), particularly the chapter called “Rachael’s Story.” “She had not masturbated or had an orgasm until she was in her 30s,” Walsh reports. “She had slept with her [first] husband, David, only a handful of times.” Not until after she began sleeping with the governor did she agree to David’s request for a divorce. Sex with Caperton appears to have been just fine: “He loved her body, she had beautiful breasts, he told her softly.” As Walsh writes, “She was almost compulsive in her need to unmask her life.” Worby was also explicit about how much she despised the scrutiny and criticism that had been coming her way since she married Caperton – she didn’t shave her legs, her literacy campaign was snobbish, she didn’t bow her head during the invocation at his inauguration. At the end of the chapter, Walsh describes finding Worby in tears as she and Caperton prepared to fly home after a weekend in Washington, D.C." ‘I don’t want to go home. I’m so unhappy there. I don’t want to go back,’ she whispered."
A spokeswoman for Worby says the first lady is “politically naive.” “She absolutely forgot she was talking to a journalist,” she says. Presumably Worby’s memory was refreshed when Walsh sent her a copy of the manuscript – a gesture that was not part of any agreement but that Walsh says she made for the sake of “accuracy and fairness.” Worby asked for only minor changes, though Walsh says the first lady told her, “It was very painful for me. I cried a lot when I read it.” Caperton, who handily won his last election and by law cannot run for governor again, has been steadfast in his support of Worby. “I think she’s a gutsy, courageous, outspoken person,” he told reporters. “That’s what I like about her.”
The controversy about Worby is sure to give Walsh’s book a boost, but even without Worby’s incredible candor, “Divided Lives” would have been a must-read. Walsh is a first-rate reporter and interviewer, and she draws us deep into the minds of three accomplished women grappling with personal crises: Worby, TV journalist Meredith Vieira and breast surgeon Alison Estabrook. “If these women of privilege were finding the challenges of balancing their lives a struggle, then that said something important about the condition of women generally,” writes Walsh. And it says something even more important about the condition of American society. What’s most startling about Vieira’s and Estabrook’s problems is how easily they might have been averted – in a country that fully accepted women in the work force.
Vieira, for instance, was offered the prize job in her field – “60 Minutes” – just as she was about to give birth to a much-longed-for baby in 1989. She tried working part time but felt miserably guilty that she might be shortchanging her son, not to mention her colleagues. And “60 Minutes” was not set up for part-timers: its correspondents were stars who made million-dollar salaties, worked incessantly and traveled up to 100 days a year. Ultimately Vieira was forced out for not pulling her share of the load. But suppose “60 Minutes” simply brought on more correspondents, paying everyone a little less, and explicitly supported men and women alike who put in some family time? Perhaps the luster of those stars would be dimmed a bit. But in return: so long, frontier culture; hello, 20th century.
Estabrook had a different problem: she was fighting classic sexism. Her starting salary in 1984 was $60,000; her male peers at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York started at $100,000. Later the hospital resisted naming her chief of breast surgery on grounds that she had no national reputation and that women preferred mole surgeons. After years of self-doubt and frantic overwork she triumphed, in part by attracting so many patients she disproved the theory. (A juicy job offer from the University of California San Diego Medical Center helped, too.) But her long, dispiriting struggle could have been avoided if the hospital had taken women seriously from the start.
Even Worby’s plight may not be as intractable as it seems. After all, Caperton won re-election with Worby and all her supposed flaws by his side. Could it be that a first lady who reveals her opinions, and works for what she believes in, has wider appeal than is acknowledged by the press or the polls? Of course, she’s still far from New York, but maybe the voters even forgave her frequent trips there. Walsh writes that one day Worby was exasperated to read that Hillary Clinton was likening herself to Barbara Bush. The brainy, independent lawyer was still trying to package herself as a humble cook-ie-baker. “Am I the only one left who is going to be myself?” Worby fumed. “Am I the only feminist left?” Maybe not.
