Opinion: Maria Shriver, California’s first lady, reveals her personal crisis as a new political spouse
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It’s not a difficult situation confined to politics, but a new book being published by California’s first lady, Maria Shriver, reveals a personal crisis that afflicted her around the time her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was elected governor.
It’s about the little-known price that all kinds of spouses, but especially political ones in the public eye, pay for the success of their husbands or wives. We’ve seen recent examples in the news of spouses paying a different kind of price for the infidelities publicly revealed by their husbands.
Silda Spitzer and Wendy Vitter’s names come to mind immediately.
But Shriver’s difficulties surrounded success and her feeling ignorant of what she was supposed to do as the Golden State’s most important political female.
In her new book, just out this week from Hyperion, ‘Just Who Will You Be?: Big Question, Little Book, Answer Within,’ Shriver talks about the difficult....
adjustment from her widely-successful career as a network correspondent for NBC and CBS from 1989 to 2004, when her movie celebrity husband also became the celebrity governor of the nation’s most populous state.
Shriver is the daughter from a famous political family of her own, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver, who was Sen. George McGovern’s vice presidential running mate on the seriously unsuccessful Democratic presidential ticket in 1972.
To avoid a conflict of interest with her husband as a new politician, Shriver had to give up her network TV job. She said she felt lost.
‘My career was gone,’ she says in her 112-page book, ‘and with it went the person I’d been for twenty-five years.’
Although the public guessed little of the inner turmoil going on in her life, the once-confident working mom Shriver admits she suddenly had no idea what a state’s first lady was supposed to do -- cutting ribbons seemed superficial, staying in her office was safe but accomplished little.
‘I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t know what to do,’ she says. ‘I never cried. I’d been tough. My mother is extremely tough.’
‘I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. But I thought if I put on the pearls and walked a couple feet behind my husband and stayed in the office that they gave me and tried to do what they told me, that that was what I was supposed to do.’
‘I cried,’ Shriver told Oprah Winfrey today. And then she added softly, ‘I still cry.’ There’s a very brief video clip here.
--Andrew Malcolm
Photo Credit: AP/Mark J. Terrill