Two Strong, Different Personalities Bound by Marriage : Harts’ Turbulent Relationship Marked by Tensions

“I remember the first time I met them 17 years ago,” said a prominent figure in Democratic politics. “I thought what an all-star couple they were.”

It must have seemed an apt description of Gary and Lee Hart.

College sweethearts who were married two months after their graduation from the tiny Oklahoma school where her minister father served as president, the Harts began their lives together like many striving young couples of the late 1950s: She taught high school English and took other jobs while he worked his way first through Yale Divinity School and then Yale Law before embarking on a career in law and politics.

“The four of us spent a lot of time together,” recalls Sally Henckel of Cleveland, who has known the Harts since 1963. Her husband, Oliver (Pudge) Henckel, was Hart’s law school classmate and managed Hart’s 1984 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. “We were all on limited budgets. The greatest time we had then was talking and getting to know each other.”

Two Separations

Yet with the passage of time, as the Harts themselves have acknowledged, theirs became a turbulent relationship--marked by personal and other tensions that led to months-long separations in 1979 and 1982.

And today it is the uncertainties of their relationship, coupled with the recurrent questions about Hart as a womanizer, that underlie the furor over the 50-year-old Democratic presidential candidate’s involvement with 29-year-old actress-model Donna Rice.

‘Love My Husband’

“I love my husband very much,” Lee Hart, 51, said Wednesday as she left their log cabin at Troublesome Gulch in the community of Kittridge near Evergreen, Colo., and boarded a small private jet to appear at her husband’s side in New Hampshire.

“I know Gary better than anyone else, and when Gary says nothing happened, nothing happened,” she said. “In the 28 years we have lived together, I have always trusted him.”

It was her first public appearance and her first public comment since the disclosure last Sunday that her husband had spent part of last weekend with Rice at the Harts’ Washington town house and had been with her on what became an overnight cruise from Florida to the island of Bimini several weeks earlier.

In some measure, the Harts’ up-and-down relationship is the story of two strong but strikingly different personalities bound together by marriage and subjected to the pressures that come with political ambitions on the national stage.

‘Warm-Hearted, Extroverted’

Lee Hart, who stayed home as Hart’s career progressed to rear their two children and later became a real estate agent, is described by friends as a “very warm-hearted, extroverted” person, often too quick to assert blunt opinions.

During the 1984 campaign, for example, when an acquaintance expressed sympathy at the unusual pressures it must impose on a marriage, Lee Hart replied tartly: “It’s not easy being married to Gary Hart any time.”

“She cries easily and gets mad easily,” said another source.

Controlled, Remote

Her husband, by contrast, is a controlled but remote figure who--Lee has told friends--finds it difficult to show warmth and affection.

“There were times when they had everything good going for them,” said one friend.

“They are not exactly the Duke and Duchess of Windsor who got along very well,” said another friend. Both of these friends, like almost all others who consented to discuss the Harts, expressed concern and sympathy for the two but spoke on condition that they not be identified.

Government Attorney

The shape of their life together has been dictated by Hart’s career. After law school, he spent three years as a government attorney in Washington, then joined a Denver law firm and later established a practice of his own focusing on natural resource and environmental law.

Politics played a role early in his career. Hart was a student volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and he helped organize Colorado for Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential effort in 1968. In 1972, Hart directed Sen. George S. McGovern’s presidential campaign, while Lee remained in Colorado.

Two years later, Hart was elected to the Senate from Colorado, where he served two terms.

As a senator’s wife, Lee reared their children, Andrea Leigh, now 23 and a senior at the University of Colorado in Denver, and John Warren, 21, a sophomore at Worchester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. She occasionally expressed feelings that she was frozen out of her husband’s all-consuming political career.

Complained About Salary

To reporters and friends, Lee Hart also complained that her husband’s Senate salary was inadequate to maintain two households. As his Senate career ended, the Harts sold their comfortable Bethesda, Md., home and bought the Capitol Hill town house where Hart was seen last weekend with Donna Rice.

Born Oletha Ludwig in Lawrence, Kan., in 1936, Lee is the daughter of a Church of Nazarene minister. Months after her birth, the family moved to Kansas City. Later at Bethany Nazarene College in Oklahoma, Lee studied speech and drama.

Publicly, Lee Hart has maintained that the accusations of Hart’s “womanizing” are untrue. Privately, friends say the subject has been “a sticking point” in their marriage. And the former Colorado senator dated others during their two periods of separation.

Yet several friends were not surprised that Lee, after three days of silence, Wednesday spoke out in Hart’s support. Said one longtime friend of Lee’s: “She doesn’t think she has the right to jeopardize the possibility of him being in the White House.”

A look at Donna Rice’s acting career. Part VI, Page 1.