The Wright Way in Washington : A Semi-Political Visit With the First Family of the House

“It’s a myth,” Jim Wright mumbles, as he tries to duck out of his office for more coffee.

The subject is the Wright temper, notoriously quick and mean. The new speaker of the House made headlines a few years back by threatening to punch out Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) on the House floor, and he once asked Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) to step outside because Stark had cursed at him. Another time he hurled a book at writer Larry L. King, who was then on his staff. And Betty Wright, his wife of 14 years, tells the story of how, shortly after they were married, her husband flung the contents of the freezer across the room because he couldn’t get the door shut.

The flying food did no damage, however, and these days, Wright’s mate has a reputation as the one person who can rein in the speaker’s runaway rage.

“What’s a myth?” she demands from across the room, eyes locked on her man, fingers tip-to-tip. “Your temper? Or that I’m a calming influence?”

“Well,” he says like a little kid caught fibbing, “I’m working on it.”

My very dearest Betty,

For 13 years we’ve shared this life

I the husband, you the wife;

I hope your life is richer than

The day on which this all began.

--Jim Wright, November 1985

Millie O’Neill she is definitely not.

The wife of the former House leader barely tolerated the capital. She never got involved in Tip O’Neill’s job, didn’t move here until he was in the leadership and then eschewed the congressional dash and dazzle, refusing interviews.

Betty Wright is happily defining her own Washington: choosing which boards to sit on (Ford’s Theatre and the National Theatre), picking her projects and her friends. Her husband’s office is quick to hand out her biography, and she’s the one keeping a diary these days.

Still, it would be too easy to paint the House’s first lady as just another ambitious Power Spouse. Like Nancy Reagan, she has certainly made her husband’s career her crusade. And like Nancy Reagan, she also seems motivated more by fierce loyalty than by the needs of her own ego.

Shows Off Portrait

On this morning, before his wife joins him in his office for an interview, the speaker seems a little antsy. To pass the time, he shows off a portrait of Betty that hangs next to his desk. In the painting, she wears a lavender dress; soft curls hug her face.

At 62, she looks 42. “Tell her that, will ya?” Wright, 64, implores his guest. “She really takes good care of herself--dieting, exercise, no drinking. . . . It’s not a religious thing or anything. She just doesn’t drink.”

When she comes in 30 minutes late, looking poised and stylish, he jumps up and brushes her cheek with his lips. She’s wearing an Eleanor Brenner suit, trendy but elegant, royal blue with broad padded shoulders. On her left forefinger is a huge topaz ring he had made for her; she wears no wedding band. Her chocolate-brown hair is cropped close and her makeup is perfect.

She seems at home in his office and spends a lot of time there. He calls her “darlin’,” and friends say he dotes on her. The two are often seen together around town, holding hands like lovers 40 years their junior.

Mixed Reviews

Indeed, Betty Wright’s young-mindedness may prove one of her husband’s greatest assets. Reviews on the new speaker have been mixed so far.

Wright’s detractors say he lacks warmth and portray him as out of step with today’s Congress--an old-style pol at heart, a pale imitation of his all-powerful Texas predecessor, Sam Rayburn. His flowery oratory seems more suited to stump campaigning than to television, and many Democrats cringed when Wright decided to deliver the response to this year’s State of the Union address himself.

The speaker draws praise for being more action-oriented than the man he succeeded, Tip O’Neill. Yet he annoyed many colleagues when he stepped out front with a tax hike proposal the same day he got elected to the job.

So Jim Wright frets, concerned that “the young people” don’t understand him, worried that the talk about his temper has gotten out of hand. Betty Wright is here to help with these nagging misperceptions. Together, they’re out to soften Wright’s hard edges, to reposition the man David Stockman called “a snake-oil vendor par excellence. “

Was a Boxing Coach

“Jim has another side,” she says, settling into a chair. “They keep bringing that silly thing out, that he was a Golden Glove boxer. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re a fighter by profession.”

“I was a scoutmaster and I was a boxing coach,” he explains. “In a town like Weatherford (Tex.), they give you all these free jobs.”

In a later interview, she shows off the poetry he’s written for her and talks about the landscapes he’s painted: “He is a romantic, very artistic.” He even shops for her, she says. For Valentine’s Day, he gave her a little gold heart and a crystal teddy bear.

She buys his clothes and has toned down the one trademark of his physical appearance--his eyebrows, naturally thick and upright, not unlike the coat of a porcupine. “Lately, his face seems more relaxed--it’s the haircut, the eyebrows,” says good friend Phyllis Coelho, wife of Majority Whip Tony Coelho (D-Calif.). “I know she’s responsible for it.”

Has Quit Smoking

The speaker’s two-pack-a-day smoking was also on her agenda, and she needled him into quitting.

It was Betty who first broke it to Wright a few years ago that he was having a problem with the younger, more reform-minded members of Congress. Around that time it was rumored that a Dick Gephardt-type might challenge him for speaker.

“I heard that people thought he was of a different generation,” that there was “a generation gap,” she says. “So I might say to him, ‘Why don’t we try to get closer to younger people? It’s a good idea to have a closer relationship with younger members.’

“I don’t know that he was focusing on it. Now he does.”

In a surprise move, for example, Wright appointed a far more liberal young Michigan congressman, David Bonior, as chief deputy whip. Naming Bonior, says former O’Neill aide Christopher Matthews, “showed dash” and gives Wright an ally “very well positioned on the other end of the spectrum.”

It’s good, Wright says, that his wife points out his weaknesses as well as his strengths. “One time I came home fulminating in frustration after a budget committee hearing,” he recalls, “and I was saying, ‘I explained it to them, I told them exactly what’s involved, and they can’t see it, they’re not moving fast enough!’ Betty said, ‘Jim, do you think they elected you leader or do you think they elected you dictator?’ ”

The photo album is titled “The Many Moods of Betty.” “This book is the property of Jim Wright,” the inscription reads, “and deals with his favorite subject: Mrs. Jim Wright.” In it are 50 pictures--Betty in bathing suits, Betty in shorts, Betty in dresses, Betty in evening gowns--all labeled in his hand.

Sitting in the study of their home, flipping through the album, pulling out the poetry addressed to “Dearest Betty,” husband and wife joke and coo like the high school sweethearts they never were. They didn’t have their first date, in fact, until both were in their mid-40s.

Jim Wright met Betty Hay in 1965, when she came to work in his office as a secretary; she later became the administrative assistant for the House Public Works Committee, on which he served as a senior member. Five years later, after he separated from his first wife, they started going out.

“It went slow,” she says.

“I didn’t want to get married again,” Jim Wright says. “I was in debt, for one thing. I had a very costly experience when I ran for the Senate in the early ‘60s and it took a long, long while to get out. I just didn’t think I was a very good catch.”

“Men feel like a failure, too,” she says.

“That’s true,” he agrees. “I had financial obligations to my former wife . . . I thought I was doing a lady no favor.”

“I finally had to talk him into it,” she says. “I said, ‘We can get out of debt. We can make it.’ And we did.”

Jim Wright’s first wife was his college sweetheart, Mary Ethelyn (Mab) Lemons, who bore their five children and helped him realize his early political ambitions. They met at Weatherford College and married in 1942, while Wright was in the service.

When Wright landed in Congress in 1955, it was, in a way, the beginning of the end of his marriage.

“Mab just didn’t like Washington very much,” writer Larry L. King says. “It was difficult for her to change with the times . . . and Jim was working all the time in those days.”

When Betty Hay and Jim Wright eventually began dating, she had a hard time with congressional wives. “There was this impression that she stole him from Mab, which just wasn’t true,” one friend says.

“I think part of it was that everyone loved Mab,” says Craig Raupe, a former Wright aide and longtime friend. “I was a little bit slow to warm. I was friendly on the surface; it just took me longer to really accept her. Here she was, this knockout . . .

“Then in getting to know her, I came to realize she was really tough, there was a lot there . . . Jim had his first tough race in 1974, and there she was right on the front lines. . . . She was a rock.”

Betty and Jim were married in 1972, shortly after his divorce became final, “in a kind of old-fashioned wedding,” Wright says.

She eventually resigned her $24,000-a-year job at the Public Works Committee, but not until he became majority leader. Wright calls her resignation “more or less a matter of public gesture,” made necessary by conflict-of-interest questions raised at the time. Now she works as a customer rep for a firm that organizes management seminars and is vice president of an investment firm she and Wright started with a Texas developer.

In recent years she has made the effort to keep the Wright family together; before Mab died last year, Betty insisted on her spending a number of holidays with them and the four Wright children (a fifth child, born with Down’s syndrome, died before reaching his second birthday).

And shortly before Mab’s death, Wright’s oldest daughter, Ginger, asked Betty if she could include her mother at a Fort Worth fund-raiser for the soon-to-be-speaker. After all, Ginger argued, her mother had been there for his early years.

Betty okayed the idea and even came up with the right phrase for the introduction. In front of 5,000 people at the Fort Worth Convention Center, Jim Wright introduced “the mother of my children.”

When Mab made it to the stage, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

As his dinner guests began arriving at the large brick house, the terrible-tempered speaker was looking a little like a schoolboy at his first prom. He was wearing a blue blazer with a yellow tie and matching silk hankie.

The night’s gathering was part of a deliberate attempt to reach out to House colleagues. Last year, the Wrights built an addition onto the house expressly for this purpose. It’s a large sun room, big enough for three tables of 10.

Among the evening’s guests were a number of liberal Democrats--Bonior, California’s Mineta, Colorado’s Pat Schroeder, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, Ohio’s Mary Rose Oakar--all very grateful to be there.

After grace was said, dinner was served by tuxedoed waiters. Guests dined on fancy salmon under another huge portrait of Betty, again in lavender. Near the end, Wright delivered a flowery toast.

Betty Wright, meanwhile, had some questions she wanted to ask her dinner partner, Pat Williams (D-Mont.).

At one point, she leaned toward Williams--with whom her husband often attends professional boxing matches--and queried him about what he and her husband see in the fights. And then she cleverly polled the congressman on a critical issue.

She said, Williams reported later, “ ‘I had hoped that when Jim’s hair lost its redness and turned gray, that his temper would go too. What do you think?’ ”

Williams didn’t dare to answer.